DGTL Festival confesses they accidentally purchased COVID-19 insurance

The renowned Dutch techno event DGTL festival has admitted they accidentally purchased a COVID-19 insurance by mistake when they planned the event, which has luckily turned to be a great present for them, as they have saved and protected around a 70% of their investments.

Coronavirus and the safety measures taken by governments has massively affected the live industry. However, is not only the decreasing trend on ticket selling and the few amounts of income that the events are generating. Cancellations and postponements is the foremost issue for promoters right now, as they struggle to recover their investments made for organising the festival. The reason for this is that almost no festivals hired a pandemic insurance that covered this situation, as they are expensive and no one til this year expected anything close to this. In a crazily saturated market like this is, with lots of amazing festivals happing everywhere at the same time, most promoters already faced huge costs that tightened their margin profits, therefore no festival ever thought about spending money in a considered “surreal” situation.

However, those that did contract the pandemic insurance, have proved to be in a privileged situation. DGTL festival was set to take place on April 11th and 12th in Amsterdam this year, however it was forced to be cancelled after the measures adopted by the Dutch government. With a crazy line up and over 45,000 tickets sold, DGTL would have been in a very sensitive situation if it wasn’t for this insurance.

The best thing about this though, is the way it was contracted. Tom Veldhuis, co-founder of Apenkooi Events (creator and promoter of DGTL festival), confessed it in a recent interview with the New York Times

“When we renewed our insurance policies, one of my employees sort of accidentally ticked the ‘pandemic’ box on the insurance form… We’re getting roughly 70 percent of our $2.3 million investment back. Otherwise it would have been quite a blow.”

Image Credit: Samuel Regan-Asante on Unsplash