The German airline Lufthansa is guaranteeing that Mother Nature won’t put a damper on its passengers’ summer vacations.

The carrier is offering what it calls “sunshine insurance.” It pays travelers leaving from Germany 20 euros a day for every day of rain. It will pay up to 200 euros for the entire trip.

Lufthansa is classifying a rainy day as any day during the trip in which the destination has more than 5 mm of rain, as posted on the Web by the German weather site wetteronline.de. To put that into perspective, the average daily rainfall in Rome for the month of September is 2.1 mm.

Lufthansa’s Web site lists more than 30 destinations worldwide that fall under the sunshine insurance. They include New York; San Francisco; Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles; Barcelona, Spain; Rome; Malaga in Spain; Malta; Venice, Italy; Cairo, Egypt, and several other tourist hot spots.

“If you book a ticket [to one of the destinations], you automatically have this insurance,” said Lufthansa spokeswoman Wencke Lemmes.

It is the first time that Lufthansa has offered this type of insurance, she said.

The insurance, however, is good for travel only from Sept. 1 to Oct. 31, and trips must be booked no later than Aug. 18.

Travelers can get compensated for rainy days by sending their travel voucher and boarding passes for both legs of a round-trip flight and the list of rainy days to the insurer.

For more information about Lufthansa’s sunshine insurance and how to submit a claim, go to www.lufthansa.com, which has an English-language option.

CNN reported that sunshine insurance is not a first in the travel business, but it might be a first for an airline. Last month, two French travel agencies offered travelers partial refunds if they experienced four days of rain in one week on their trip.

Migrated