2025 Insurance Market Update for Hotel Owners

Written By Jazz Sohi

What’s Really Driving Your Premiums?

If you own and operate hotels, 2025 is a tale of two markets: a moderating property landscape versus still-elevated casualty pricing (GL/Auto/Excess) and a steady workers’ comp picture. Here’s the short version—and how to respond.

Commercial Property (CP):
After several hard years, capacity has improved. For well-managed, lower-CAT hotels, we’re seeing flat to ±5% outcomes; catastrophe-exposed, older construction, and coastal risks can still see -10% to +10% depending on engineering, deductibles, and layering structure. Shared/layered towers remain volatile in working layers. Brown & Brown

General Liability (GL) & Excess/Umbrella:
Casualty rates remain pressured by social inflation and large jury awards. Many hospitality accounts are experiencing mid-single to mid-teens GL increases, with excess liability carrying the brunt of stress as primary carriers pull back; excess risk-adjusted rates rose notably through mid-2025. Liquor-driven exposures and high-footfall venues face tighter limits and underwriting scrutiny. Risk Strategies+2RPSIns+2

What’s behind it? “Nuclear verdicts” are still surging—135 verdicts in 2024 (+52% YoY) with $31.3B in awards—and third-party litigation funding remains a headwind. SimpleSolve

Workers’ Compensation (WC):
WC remains the most stable line. NCCI indicates average loss-cost/rate reductions (~6%) from 2024→2025 across its filings, though a few jurisdictions (e.g., MA) are proposing increases, and individual experience mods and payroll mix can offset headline trends. NCCI+1

EPLI (Employment Practices Liability):
Labor-intensive hotel ops + wage/HR complexity = persistent EPLI claim activity. Premiums and retentions are highly account-specific, but industry-wide social and economic inflation is adding loss pressure, keeping many renewals flat-to-up unless you demonstrate strong controls. The Doctors

What Hotel Owners Can Do Now

  • Engineer your risk: recent roof/MEP upgrades, sprinklers, and FLS scores help property pricing and deductibles. (Have your latest vendor reports at renewal.) Brown & Brown

  • Contract & premises discipline: documented slip-and-fall protocols, liquor-service training, incident logs, and video retention are gold for GL/excess. RPSIns

  • HR hygiene for EPLI: supervisor training, consistent write-ups, wage-and-hour audits, and hotline access demonstrate better-than-peer controls. The Doctors

  • WC ergonomics: lift-assist policies, slip-resistant footwear programs, and RTW (return-to-work) plans help push mods down over time. NCCI

  • Marketing strategy: if you’ve had large claims or CAT losses, start earlier and be open to layered programs and higher deductibles/SIRs where the economics pencil. Brown & Brown

Bottom line: property relief is real but uneven; casualty remains elevated; WC is your ballast. A documentation-heavy story and flexible program design are winning 2025 renewals.

Jazz Sohi
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