Kris Ward on Leisure Risk, Defensibility, and What Underwriters Really Want to See
“Every claim is just a symptom of a hidden operational gap”
Kris Ward
Associate Vice President Sales
McGowan Allied Specialty Insurance
27th May
Blog
5 min read
Kris has spent nearly three decades in leisure insurance, starting on the claims desk at Aviva, where he quickly learned that every incident traces back to an operational gap somewhere. That foundation shaped everything that followed, and today he helps operators build businesses that can defend themselves when it matters most.
In this piece, Kris shares what separates defensible operators from vulnerable ones, the blind spots that quietly drive premiums up, and why the right partners on the ground make all the difference.
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You started your career on the claims side at Aviva before moving into broking. How did working claims early on shape the way you approach risk management and policy design for leisure operators today?
When you spend 30 years in insurance, you see it all. But nothing shapes your perspective quite like where you start.
My career began on the front lines of claims handling, where every file on my desk was a story, a broken bone, damaged property, a lawsuit, a catastrophic failure. It didn't take long to realise something crucial, every claim is just a symptom of a hidden operational gap.
Instead of looking at risk from the top down, I began reverse-engineering it from the courtroom back to the operator's floor, and that bottom-up perspective has driven my approach ever since.
A lot of my journey was forged in the UK during a period of massive regulatory shift. As health and safety legislation tightened, leisure operators found themselves facing unprecedented litigation risks. It wasn't enough to just have insurance anymore, operators needed to be able to defend themselves. So I helped develop a defensibility-based approach where we didn't just write policies, we overhauled operational habits. We built a system so robust that if an incident occurred, the operator's response, documentation, and safety protocols formed an ironclad defence.
Now I'm bringing those same principles to the US. The legal landscapes differ, but human behaviour and operational risk don't. My focus is on two things: embedding proactive health and safety standards into daily routines so the best claim is the one that never happens, and making sure that when an incident does occur, operators are ready from minute one, gathering evidence, responding correctly, and limiting their exposure.
Starting in claims taught me how the story ends if you aren't careful. Today, my mission is to help leisure operators rewrite that script, and it's a culture that has to start at the top and filter all the way down to the shop floor.
You've spent nearly three decades across both the U.K. and U.S. markets. What are the biggest differences in how leisure risk is underwritten between those markets, and where do operators most often get caught out when expanding internationally?
The primary difference comes down to three things: litigation density, state-by-state regulatory fragmentation, and how policies are actually structured.
In the UK, underwriters operate under a single national framework regulated by the FCA, and brokers present risk in full, it's a relationship-driven, narrative process. In the US, you're navigating 50 separate state insurance departments, each with their own rules, and insurance is form-based. That fragmentation alone makes certain states genuinely difficult to place risks in.
The other major difference is claims culture. The UK has gone through significant injury and litigation reform over the last 25 years, and insurers have taken hard lines on settlements, so injury payouts are limited and class actions are rare. Here in the US, that simply isn't the case. Payouts are uncapped, class actions are common, and the litigation exposure shapes everything about how US underwriters price and segment leisure risk.
Financial security of your insurer matters enormously too, and this is something operators don't always think about. The UK has strict solvency rules, but I've still seen insurers collapse overnight, the most significant being Independent Insurance going insolvent in the early 2000s, which created a hard market and left brokers scrambling to replace client policies at short notice. You need to know who's backing your paper.
As for where operators get caught out when expanding internationally, it almost always comes down to assuming the model they know translates cleanly to the new market. It doesn't. The legal structure, the claims environment, the regulatory requirements, they're fundamentally different on either side of the pond. My advice is simple: make sure you have the right partners on the ground before you move, not after.
You talk about "defensibility of the business" as a core focus. In practical terms, what does a defensible amusement operator actually look like to an underwriter today?
There are quite a few factors, and underwriters do all have their own viewpoints, but the ones that really capture great operations, and separate the defensible from the vulnerable, tend to follow a similar pattern.
Record-keeping is the foundation. We're talking digitised logs showing daily, weekly, and annual safety checks, not a clipboard hanging on a wall somewhere. Missing or incomplete logs are one of the first things that unravel a defence when a claim goes to litigation.
Staff training is equally critical, and it needs to be documented and repeatable, not just a one-off induction. Signed employee acknowledgments matter here, particularly in environments with high turnover. If you can't prove someone was trained, it's very difficult to defend a decision they made on the floor. Incident management is where a lot of operators fall short. When something goes wrong, the clock starts immediately.
A defensible operator has a formalised procedure in place before anything happens, immediate evidence collection, witness statements taken on the spot, video footage preserved. That groundwork in the first hour can determine the outcome of a claim years later.
Equipment maintenance is non-negotiable. Strict adherence to manufacturer guidelines and regular third-party inspections from state-certified inspectors aren't just good practice, they're often the line between a defensible position and a catastrophic liability exposure.
Finally, contractual risk transfer. Robust liability waivers for guests, and solid hold-harmless agreements with any contractors or vendors on site. A lot of operators are unknowingly carrying risk that should sit with a third party.
Taken together, these aren't just tick-boxes for an underwriter, they tell a story about the culture of the business. And culture is ultimately what underwriters are trying to read.
Across FECs, water parks, and amusement operators, what are the most common blind spots you see that end up driving claims or premium increases?
The same issues come up time and again, and they're rarely dramatic, they're the quiet, unglamorous stuff that operators let slip.
Documentation is the biggest one. Not the absence of it entirely, but the gaps. A safety check that wasn't logged, a maintenance visit that wasn't signed off, a staff training session that happened but was never recorded. In isolation each one seems minor, but in litigation they become the holes in your defence. Underwriters notice them too, incomplete records signal a broader cultural problem, and that gets priced in at renewal.
Procedural flaws are usually about operators having the right policies on paper but not following them in practice. Inspection checklists that get rubber-stamped rather than properly completed, or procedures that made sense when the business was smaller but haven't kept pace with growth. In FECs and water parks especially, where you have high footfall, fast-moving environments and seasonal staff, the gap between what the procedure says and what actually happens on the floor can be significant.
We're seeing more operators introduce real-time operational visibility using existing infrastructure. Does having measurable proof of operational performance, dispatch consistency, crowd flow, incident response impact premiums?
It goes straight to your risk profile. Operators who can bring real-time data to the table are telling a very different story to those who can only offer a paper checklist from six months ago.
Dispatch consistency, crowd flow, incident response times, underwriters are fundamentally trying to answer one question: how well is this operation managed? Objective, continuous data answers that far more convincingly than self-reported information ever could. An operator who can show timestamped evidence of how they responded to an incident, what happened, when, who was involved, what was done, is in a much stronger defensive position, and underwriters know it.
Operators who bring this to the table aren't just ticking boxes. They're demonstrating a culture of operational discipline, and that's always where the best premiums live.
“Objective, continuous data answers that far more convincingly than self-reported information ever could. An operator who can show timestamped evidence of how they responded to an incident, what happened, when, who was involved, what was done, is in a much stronger defensive position, and underwriters know it”.
For an operator who feels their premiums are unjustifiably high, what are the first things you would audit internally before going back to market?
It's a topic in its own right, and honestly it's exactly where a trusted broker earns their keep, but there are things an operator can do before they even pick up the phone.
Start with your claims history. Not just the headline numbers, but the detail. Are there patterns? Repeat incident types, specific attractions, particular times of year? If you can identify the drivers before going to market, you can address them rather than just hoping for a better quote.
Next, get your documentation in order. Safety logs, training records, maintenance schedules, incident reports, gaps in records are expensive. An underwriter reviewing a clean, complete submission will price it very differently to one full of holes.
Look at how incidents have been managed too. If claims have been handled poorly, slow response, poor evidence gathering, no follow-up with the injured party, that history follows you. Showing that you've changed procedures since then matters.
Finally, can you demonstrate best-in-class operations? Real-time data, third-party inspection records, contractual risk transfer with vendors, the more evidence you bring to the table, the stronger your negotiating position.
But get the right broker involved early. Someone who knows the leisure sector and can present your risk in the best possible light. That relationship is often worth more than anything else on this list.
Final Thoughts
Kris has seen the industry from every angle, the thinking across everything he shared is simple, the operators who invest in getting it right before something goes wrong, are the ones who sleep at night. Whether you're running a water park in Florida or an FEC in the Midlands, that principle doesn't change.
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