Ourea Events - Member Profile

When the Mutual first began, the profile of Members looked very differently, to how it looks today.  We have seen a range of different activity providers emerge over the time we have been providing vital Public Liability cover to Members, Like any business we have embraced the diversity whilst always keeping at its heart to protect the Members who choose to take cover with us.

One area where we have seen an increase is the area of 'running events', (pardon the pun!) by this we mean organisers of trail runs and challenge events where the outdoors provides the exciting and often challenging backdrop to some incredible running events such as the Dragons Back Race.  One such Member is Ourea Events who joined the Mutual in 2020 and were kind enough to share their story with us in our Newsletter from January 2023.

Can you tell us the type of events that Ourea put on?

Our mission statement is “To create world-class events that inspire participants to take on challenging and life-affirming adventures.”; basically we aim to get off-road running adventures on at least someone’s annual, if not lifetime, bucket-list! Generally speaking, the events sit neatly well within the labels of trail and ultra (or sky-) running but whilst our portfolio of events includes some single-day races (5-52km), most of the events are multi-day stage races up to eight days (and 400km) long!

Which are the most popular events and where have you seen an increase in people participating?

Our one-of-a-kind genre SCARPA Great Lakeland 3Day has seen huge growth over the years (from 50 people in 2012 to 1000 people in 2022, an increase of 1900%! It’s a really relaxed and friendly event that offers participants a supported running and camping adventure at a new venue in the Lake District each year, offering mix-and-match courses that allow them to bag either cafés or Wainwrights depending on how they feel each day. Overnight camps include communal marquees, bars, outside caterers, cake tokens, haybales and fire pits – the real crowd-pleaser is that we transport participants’ overnight luggage to the camp so they don’t have to run with it.

There is also a steadily growing appetite to take on the more serious and challenging undertakings that are our stage races such as the Montane Dragon’s Back Race® (Wales – 6 days) or the Cape Wrath Ultra® (Scotland – 8 days) – we’re seeing lots of interest from overseas especially, and a good portion of that from outside of Europe.

Are there any challenges you face this year in the industry or want to raise awareness of? 

The most pertinent problems are the economic ones – I need not go into detail on the impacts of inflation on our supplier costs or overheads – but it’s fair to say we’re also working harder than ever to convince prospective participants to commit some of their disposable income into race entries. There is also still something going on post-Covid that is affecting the appetite to enter (beyond any economic reason) that we cannot quite put our finger on.

You have been with the Mutual since 2020 via recommendation.  What do you see as the benefits of being part of the Mutual? 

In summary there’s simply no more ‘square peg round hole’; we just never used to fit the ‘standard’ business type that other insurers expected and we were constantly battling to try and ensure we were covered successfully for our reasonably diverse but niche operations as an events business and all that comes with that. It’s an absolute relief and breath of fresh air to work directly with the underwriting team at AIM; we can email or phone with the most left-field enquiries or requests and they’ll be dealt with in the calmest manner - ‘that’s no problem’ - and I’m not sure we’ve ever requested something that hasn’t been possible… yet. The feel good factor of being a member of a mutual is not to be underrated either, especially when AIM’s pricing is so much fairer than the big corporate giants’!

Do you have any exciting projects lined up for the future? 

We are excited to be launching a hiring arm to the business in 2023 as a ‘developing hire member’ of MUTA. We have set up Ourea Hire in response to a key contractor cancelling their agreement two months prior to one of our expedition races. You can imagine that this experience was somewhat testing and quickly led us to purchasing our own marquees to ensure we would not be in this potentially show-stopping position again. As event organisers, we understand that securing the right infrastructure is mission critical and we’d love to share our expertise with you too! You can find out more at www.oureaevents.com/ourea-hire