Travel Insurers Must Learn to Deal with Moving Targets
Whether vaccine passports become permanent fixtures for international travel or fade with time, travel insurance will remain an indispensable protection against disruptive trip cancellations or expensive medical emergencies far from home.
But as the pandemic has taught us, travel cover needs to evolve, expand, become more agile, quicker to respond to moving targets, more responsive to individual needs as well as government mandates, yet still remain accessible to moms and dads taking their kids to the beach.
Recently, in writing an article for the International Travel Insurance Journal (ITIJ) I interviewed travel insurance experts in Europe, North America, and the Asia Pacific region, and found universal agreement that travel cover must be able to respond more quickly and appropriately to needs of consumers forced into an increasingly chaotic and complex world of new rules.
Robin Ingle, CEO of UK-based Global Special Risk identified trip-cancellation/interruption products as particularly sensitive issues to be addressed “given the fear created in 2020 with travel disruptions, vouchers and a lack of clear industry communication to travellers.” He noted: “This product will need to be restructured and redesigned to make it viable. Each stockholder will need to share in the risk. It cannot be put solely on the insurer’s back. Handled properly this can be done.”
Other concerns emphasized by interviewees dealt with the need to make travel policies more comprehensive as well as comprehensible to the purchaser, and to use clear, straightforward language especially when dealing with individuals with special needs. Travel coverage should also be reshaped to provide more extensive coverage for cancellations and interruptions due to quarantine requirements of individual nations, to get customers home safely, efficiently, and wherever possible to help them get their money back when things go wrong through no fault of their own.
Respondents also felt an urgency to get on with the job. Because if we have learned anything, it is that there is no predetermined timetable for the onset of plagues-- as we saw in 2002 with SARS; 2010 with HINI; 2012 with MERS (camel flu); 2014 with Ebola 2015 with ZIKA. Epidemics and even pandemics are not simply “historical” aberrations, they are real, they are part of our future, and they will happen again.
We have seen that travel insurers could move expeditiously when pressed, as when coverage of COVID-related illness and cancellations benefits were layered into existing products in relatively short order, or cancellations due to mandated quarantine measures were being covered, or even when travellers venturing into regions against government advice (FCDO or State Department) could find protection. And the surge of Cancel for Any Reason products added considerable assurance that customers’ rights to cancel a trip remained reasonable and fair. Even at a 40 percent premium supplement, CFAR’s have become staple products in growing markets.
Largely, these were reactions to loopholes that needed to be covered, and inevitably such expansions for specialized, targeted products may overtake the one-size fits all model. But respondents to this survey were also adamant that though such expansions may raise prices, they would not lose sight of the mission to keep travel insurance affordable for as many people as possible—even for that family going on holiday to the beach.
By Milan Korcok
Milan Korcok is a national award wining medical writer who has been covering international medical and travel health issues for leading professionals journal in the United States, Canada, and the UK for many years. He works and resides in Florida.