As they wrestle with these questions, many are turning to travel insurance to help alleviate their concerns. Travel insurance is a specialized offering that covers any unexpected or undesirable losses that may occur during travel, and it’s now becoming big business. According to recent research, the global travel insurance market was valued at $14.2 billion in 2021 and is expected to grow to nearly $124.8 billion by 2031–a CAGR of approximately 24.7%.
Traditional Pricing Approaches Come Up Short
Yet many insurance carriers simply aren’t ready to capitalize on this growing opportunity.
Why is this? A closer look shows that many, if not most, insurance companies still face real challenges when it comes to pricing travel insurance products and add-on offers. It’s a delicate balancing act: How can they price travel insurance premiums in order to meet consumers’ demand and win the business, but do so in a way to maximize profitability and cover any losses?
Related: Life Insurance Rating Engine & Administration Systems
The fact is that many insurance companies still lack the modern insurance pricing technology they need to model prices, personalize offers, and present it to consumers in real time. These are the experiences most consumers expect from any company they do business with. So insurance carriers now face new pressures to move away from purely transactional offers and interact with customers in the way they prefer.
Yet bringing this vision to life can be difficult, if not impossible, if insurance companies still rely on outdated, legacy technology that presents real challenges, both for internal efficiencies as well as for desired results in the market. If insurers still use spreadsheets, manual data entry, or even disparate third-party systems, chances are good that they face the following obstacles related to pricing:
Slower speed to market: In some cases, it may take insurance carriers five to six months (if not longer) to implement significant changes to pricing models. This is clearly far too slow when it comes to developing competitive travel insurance offers and deploying them into the market.
Lost productivity and excessive errors: Too many manual processes can become a nightmare for internal workflows and overall efficiency. Not only are manual processes extremely time-consuming, but they can often lead to errors that either require more time to address or cause real pricing issues.
Too many handoffs: We’ve seen the case where some insurers use many different pricing and rating engines–as many as seven for one insurer– as well as specialized third-party systems related to data management or analytics. Attempting to work in so many silos inevitably means there are too many handoffs when updating pricing models–too many opportunities for something to go wrong.
Lack of personalization: Many insurers don’t have the data or the means to truly personalize their insurance offers. This includes everything from connecting with customers in their preferred channel to offering intelligent travel insurance add-ons that are customized for their trip. Consumers now demand these types of experiences–and are increasingly willing to take their business to insurers who can provide them.
Guesswork related to segmentation and profitability: Legacy technology may not be able to help insurers run advanced models and use AI- or ML-driven insights to understand their best consumer segments and how to maximize profitability. This is now critical in understanding ideal customers, creating the right offers and prices to win their business, and retain their business.
If insurance carriers are looking to win more travel insurance business, they need to overcome these challenges with more modern insurance technology.
The Right Technology for Travel Insurance
