Garage keepers insurance when you are not a repair shop

General information, not legal or insurance advice. The forms and program documents cited here are published samples and carrier-specific material. Your declarations, endorsements, and applicable law may differ — ask your insurer or broker about your actual policy.

Does the endorsement care what trade you are in?

No. The coverage grant turns on custody of a customer’s auto, and carrier paperwork treats non-repair operations as part of the same class. CRC rates “Valet & Parking” as a business type on the same garage application it uses for body work (crcgroup.com). The ISO endorsement itself describes the coverage in terms of autos left in the insured’s care, not in terms of an industry (sample CA 99 37 10 01).

• Custody businesses that are not repair shops

• Hotel or restaurant valet

  What decides custody

  Keys handed over and the car parked by your staff — attended parking, not a guest self-parking in an open lot.

  Where the limit bites

  One limit per property. A second hotel is a second location, not more of the first one's limit.

• Parking garage or standalone valet

  What decides custody

  Attended, keyed operation. CRC lists “Valet & Parking” as a business type on its garage application.

  Where the limit bites

  Peak occupancy, not average — the limit is tested on the fullest night of the year.

• Multi-location retail with service bays

  What decides custody

  Customer vehicles held for work at each individual store.

  Where the limit bites

  Limits are written per location, not per company. A twelve-store chain does not share one bucket.

The distinction that actually decides custody is attendance, not signage. A guest who parks their own car in your open lot and keeps the keys has not handed you custody; a guest who hands the keys to your staff has. That is the same care, custody, or control question a repair shop answers, reached by a different route.

The limit is per location, and it is tested on your busiest night

This is the point most often got wrong by multi-site operators, and it is arithmetic rather than opinion. Century Surety publishes $150,000 per auto, submit to $300,000, and $1,000,000 per location (Century Surety). Read that last figure as a per-site number and a chain with twelve sites has twelve separate towers, each tested against the cars standing at that site on its fullest night rather than against the company average.

The corollary is the uncomfortable half: no location borrows headroom from a quiet sibling. A downtown property that fills on event nights is not protected by the suburban site that never does, however the two average out on a spreadsheet.

• ◐Twelve sites means twelve separate towers, not one shared bucket.
• ✕A quiet site lends no headroom to a busy one. There is no company-wide pool to draw on.
• ◐Each site is tested against the vehicles standing there on its fullest night, not against the chain’s average night.

Your segment can be written out of the class entirely

Eligibility is a separate question from the coverage trigger, and it is decided by class before anyone looks at your loss history. NEXT’s appetite guide extends the garagekeepers endorsement to tire shops, auto repair, auto body, non-self-serve car wash, and oil change — and excludes auto detailing from it (NEXT). A business can be unmistakably a custody operation and still not be one this carrier writes.

So before assuming the endorsement follows your industry, find your operation named on the carrier’s own appetite sheet. The garage applications themselves ask what the operation does and what the work mix is, rather than accepting a category label (Argo, Admiral). Appetite also differs by edition, so a sheet a broker quoted from last year is not necessarily the one in force.

The custody record problem attended parking has

A repair shop documents custody almost as a by-product: there is a repair order, an intake inspection, a work scope. Attended parking has no such artifact. The car arrives, the keys change hands, and the whole accounting is a ticket and a hook — which is the record you will be asked to produce if a vehicle comes back marked.

For anyone parking Teslas in particular, there is a gap in that record no policy closes. An NFC key card handed to a valet cannot be remote-wiped and carries no per-card usage log, so nothing records which of the car’s up-to-19 keys moved it; deletion happens only at the vehicle’s own touchscreen, under Controls > Locks. Counting cards back at the stand is the entire audit trail. See whether a Tesla key card can be tracked.

Valet Mode helps at the car rather than in your records. It caps speed at 70 mph and locks the frunk and glovebox, which suits attended parking considerably better than it suits a shop that needs frunk access all day for film or panel work. Neither the mode nor the card is a substitute for writing down who held the car and when. See Valet Mode for valet operators and the notes for valet operators.

What the file has to answer when there is no repair order

The questions an insurer asks do not change because you are a parking operator. Which vehicle, which visit, what condition it arrived in, who held it, and what happened when the damage was noticed — a valet operation simply has to record them deliberately instead of inheriting them from a work order. What a garagekeepers claim actually requires is covered in what evidence a garage keepers claim requires; the coverage forms themselves are in garage keepers liability, explained.