CUSTOMER PATHWAYS: TRAVEL PROTECTION
Up, up and away! For thousands of UK holidaymakers looking forward to their first trip abroad in two years, Easter 2022 was a crushing disappointment. With more than 1,300 scheduled routes cancelled over the four-day bank holiday weekend, airlines and airports struggled to cope with staff shortages as demand spiked by 50 per cent to 75 per cent compared to
pre-pandemic levels. Travellers who’d been alerted in advance to changes to their travel plans could count themselves lucky; others were unexpectedly stranded for hours, watching blank departure boards, spending their holiday cash in overpriced airport lounges and wondering if it was worth all the effort. They no doubt also wondered when and if they’d get their money back. The chaos was a reputational disaster for an industry still in fragile recovery from COVID-19, now also having to deal with soaring fuel costs, recruitment ffnews.com
Koala is broadening insurers’ horizons when it comes to travel protection products in a post-pandemic world. We spoke to Co-founder Ugo Weyl issues, sporadic lockdowns in Asia, and disruption caused by the war in Ukraine. It led some forecasters to extend the date by which they now expect air traffic to
return to pre-pandemic levels, to the second quarter of 2025. Travel insurers have, similarly, had to deal with a rollercoaster two years. First, they were hit by an avalanche of claims, triggered by a global movement ban, putting analogue processes under extreme pressure. That was quickly followed by a shift in public sentiment around travel insurance, many concluding that the comprehensive policies they’d routinely taken in the past and barely looked at, didn’t stand up to scrutiny in this new and unpredictable travel environment. And, perhaps most importantly, the insurance industry as a whole had to figure out ways
to work with distributors to inspire public confidence in travel again – or they were all in the soup. Airlines in particular, which had viewed cross-selling insurance simply as a revenue generator, began to see it as a way to add value to their product and get nervous customers, literally, back on board. It was into this maelstrom that Paris-based B2B insurtech startup Koala stuck a parametric paw. Launched in 2018 by Ugo Weyl, Léo Tordjman and Antony Mechin, the Koala
team had been preparing to release the company’s first product in 2020 – an option for customers to be automatically compensated if their flight is delayed, cancelled or diverted, it can be bundled via an API into a travel company’s booking process. True to Koala’s vision for providing travel protection ‘with no exclusions, no proof and compensating travellers as soon a disruption occurs’, it stripped away several layers of complexity to offer an ultimate user experience, which also lowered claims management costs. Its flight disruption and missed connection protection are underpinned by parametric technology. Issue 7 | TheInsurtechMagazine
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