Why your boozy après ski could land you in jail
If you enjoy a drink or two over lunch in a mountain restaurant, it might pay to pause before you order a third or fourth this winter. While it may feel as though a few vins chauds will have a positive effect on your carving technique, indulge in too many and it could cost you.
If you are injured on the piste and your insurer finds out that you have a substantial amount of alcohol in your blood, there is a significant risk that it won’t pay out for the cost of your rescue and medical treatment. And if you are in Italy, you will also be putting yourself on the wrong side of the law.
I feel slightly like the Christmas Grinch bringing this up. But the recent failure of a skier to win a compensation payout from her tour operator served as a reminder. She had been injured while returning to her chalet drunk, and although this case was not directly connected to her insurance policy, it highlights how badly things can go wrong when you mix speed with alcohol.
Small-print exclusions
It is no small problem. The most recent data, from research by Direct Line in 2019, claimed that skiers were 43 per cent more likely to be involved in a crash after drinking alcohol. And it said that some 1,000 injuries a day were “a direct result of consuming alcohol while skiing” (although to put this in context, fewer than 100 of these were so bad that the victim needed to be transported off the mountain).
As mentioned, the reason for caution is not simply the fear of injury, however; it is the small-print exclusions in virtually all travel insurance policies that relate to alcohol. For example, Aviva excludes claims caused by “consumption of alcohol… to an extent… where your judgement is affected causing you to take actions you would not usually take”.
Zurich is more precise, excluding claims caused by “you drinking too much alcohol”. It gives an apparently quite generous allowance – “the results of a blood test which shows that your blood alcohol level exceeds 0.19%”. That is roughly double the United Kingdom drink-driving limit and equates to roughly four pints of beer or four 175ml glasses of wine, though a couple of strong cocktails would also push the limit. But it gives itself additional leeway, and will also disbar claims when, for example, a medical practitioner has stated “that your alcohol consumption has caused or actively contributed to your injury or illness”.
Burden of proof
In practice, you might get away with it. An insurer can refuse a payout only if it has evidence that you were drunk. If you break a leg, are taken down the mountain on a blood wagon and are fixed up in a local hospital, you won’t routinely be breathalysed or have a blood test done.
The Financial Ombudsman, which adjudicates on claims which have been rejected by insurance companies, has been robust in setting out its view: “As with all insurance cases, it is up to an insurer to show that an exclusion applies, not for their customer to show that it doesn’t.” It expects a “high standard of proof from insurers – proof that’s consistent with other evidence” and says it generally puts more weight on evidence from blood tests – and less on “one-off remarks by a doctor at the time of any accident”.
It isn’t only injury to yourself that you need to think about, however. Just as with drink-driving, you can be as careful as you like as you ski down the piste, but if you are involved in a collision, especially one which injures another skier, you could be in serious trouble. Even if you don’t feel it was your fault, if you are breathalysed and found to have alcohol in your system, it will be much harder to prove your innocence.
That could be an issue not only with your insurance, but in the local courts. Very few countries have clear legal limits on alcohol levels for skiers, but last year, Italy introduced a legal limit of just 0.5mg per litre of blood (0.05 per cent) – in line with the Italian drink-driving limits. That limit is so low that a heavy night of après-ski could easily leave you in breach of it even as you head off the lifts the next morning.
