Evening all!

My daughter has been told that she must have personal civil/public liability insurance for herself to be a student in Switzerland.

I phoned First Direct in the UK as the first insurance company I could think of - and they didn't have a clue what I needed.

Please could anybody shed some light on this for me? Is this normally conected to aother type of insurance policy such as life assurance/health insurance etc. maybe?

Does anyone have a UK policy or do you think its a Swiss thing only done by Swiss insurers?

Please forgive my ignorance - I'm new to all this!

Personal liability insurance (in German called Privathaftpflichtversicherung) is typically a European thing, Germans, Swiss, Austrians have it. Not a abad product to have when you sit on somebody's glasses or set their palm tree on fire. Don't ask, it's a long story. Any local insurance company (AXA Winterthur, Zurich, ...) will happily sell it to her, and it ain't all that pricey. www.comparis.ch can probably give you comparison shopping quotes.

Oooh that was quick Tomcat - cheers!

Daughter is the type to do all of those things (glasses, palm tree...) and more besides - will check it out tomorrow morning.

often Privathaftpflichtversicherung and Hausratversicherung (Home contents insurance) are combined under one policy. It is often cheaper to have a combined policy rather than separate policies from different companies.

I have a combined policy from Zurich Connect. You can apply direct online in English.

Cheers Litespeed - i will add this to my list - much appreciated!

May have to get it seperately though as haven't figured out the 'no house without a student permit/ no student permit without an address' type problem yet.

Just wanted to add an update to this thread as it may be helpful to others in a similar situation.

After getting quotes from comparis.ch for this insurance I found it impossible to get insurance from these Swiss companies without being in Switzerland. From memory the quotes worked out at approx £70 to £100.
(Zurich UK don't offer this even though Zurich Switzerland do!)

I then found that Endsleigh (UK student insurance) do a policy for UK students studying abroad. They count Switzerland as 'Europe' so their policy is £145 for the year. More expensive than the Swiss ones, but worth it to be able to get it done and dusted in advance I thought.

Sadly as daughter will be a dance student at Bejart, they cannot cover her because she is not a 'proper' student. So I'm back to square one again. Just thought that for other students it was worth mentioning the Endsleigh policy.

I'm visiting Lausanne with daughter next week - does anybody know if there are branches of Zurich or other insurers that I could just walk into and try to buy this policy next week? (or will we be unable to do it because she doesn't have a Swiss address yet?)

Why not use the school's address till you have a residential address?

Insurers are usually happy to sell insurance. Reluctance begins when there is a claim.

Get in touch with Jenny who posts on this forum (http://www.englishforum.ch/members/610-jenny.html) - she's an independent insurance broker and English, so there's no language issue. She's very knowledgeable and practical - if there's a way round this, she will know. Although my feeling is that your daughter won't need the policy to start just yet anyway, so can probably wait until she knows where she'll be living.

But she'll almost certainly need it then - we had to have this liability insurance before we moved over, in order to sign our appt lease (we had to supply a copy with the signed contract) and the paperwork was happily sent out to our UK address on the basis that we'd be in Switzerland 'soon'.

kodokan

Thanks both for your responses.

She needs the insurance on the first day of school in order to apply for her student permit. But if we find a flat first I guess she will need it sooner.

Will get in touch with Jenny as people here seem happy to reccommend her. I tried an insurance broker in UK but they couldn't do this type of insurance. The conversation was a bit surreal and ended up with me being put through to a different company and being told to say the code word 'Jaguar'. Sadly, even though I used my special code word the next person was also unable to help!

The code word was intended for the recommending person to get a kickback.

Just a shame 'Jaguar' and his mate were both useless in this instance!

I must think of my own exciting code word in case I ever need one... what would everybody else's be?

Mmm just ever so slightly going off-topic here...

Just wanted to post a huge THANKYOU to Jenny who has helped me to get an insurance policy in place for my daughter Natasha who is moving to Lausanne in 3 weeks time.

Thanks for all of your help and for sharing your knowledge with us Jenny - can't begin to tell you how much we appreciate your help and support.