Paris attacks of November 13, 2015

On the evening of November 13, 2015, three teams struck outside the Stade de France, café terraces in the 10th and 11th arrondissements, and the Bataclan concert hall. 130 dead, several hundred injured. For a property underwriter, the file is nearly empty: shop windows, facades, a concert hall. Article L. 126-2 applies, for amounts that are modest on GAREAT's scale. The loss sits elsewhere. In the following weeks, Paris hotel occupancy rates drop, foreign bookings are canceled, restaurants in the affected neighborhoods empty out, and none of it triggers a standard policy, because no physical damage caused the interruption. Extensions for denial of access or civil authority orders usually require a perimeter and a closure period that few businesses reached. The human cost went through the FGTI, which received nearly 2,800 claims and whose levy on each property contract was raised on January 1, 2017. The market turned this into products: non-damage business interruption covers triggered by an attack within a set radius of the premises, often bought by hotels, with modest limits and short indemnity periods. They sit outside the mandatory regime, on the political violence market or with private reinsurance, and the underwriter then has to track the accumulation of those radii within one neighborhood, because a single attack triggers all of them at once.