World Travel Protection’s Debra Harvey (pictured above) is probably relieved this week’s volcanic activity on Iceland looks unlikely to disrupt world travel like it did in 2010.
“I was watching that Icelandic volcano going, ‘This is scary, please don’t erupt!’” said Harvey, the company’s operations manager for clinical services. “With an event like that, as soon as it closes a travel hub, it will impact us.”
So far, the ongoing eruption on the Reykjanes Peninsula that started Monday has only slightly impacted local flights and travel. In 2010, the Eyjafjallajokull volcano spewed an ash cloud that stranded tens of millions of flights all over the world.
In a recent interview with Insurance Business Harvey discussed the travel risks she’s managed during a more than two-decade career. Some of her work has intersected with major global catastrophes.
“I was on shift on Boxing Day and this is usually a fairly quiet day for us,” she said.
Then she received a phone call.
“I remember the first call we got was a woman who said, ‘I’m on a roof and there’s been a flood,’” said Harvey. “Then the call cut out and we never heard from her again.”
She said they weren’t able to get the woman’s name but the call was from Thailand.
“Thailand is known for flooding because they do get torrential rains and so initially no-one knew it was a tsunami, it was just this huge body of water and people were missing, trying to find loved ones that had been separated - it was quite horrific,” said Harvey.
Thousands of travellers were killed in the disaster, including 26 Australians, most in Thailand. The scale of the disaster was unprecedented.
According to news reports, the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami is thought to be the deadliest tsunami in history. The catastrophe killed more than 230,000 people across 14 countries. More than half of the deaths were in Indonesia. However, the impact reached as far away as the African continent, where, according to reports, it killed 100s.
Scientists say it was caused by the third-biggest earthquake ever recorded and, according to reports, made the Earth vibrate by up to one centimetre.
The tsunami also displaced about 30 cubic kilometres of water, resulting in a huge tsunami across the Indian Ocean moving at speeds of up to 800 km/h and producing waves of 30 metres in height.
Harvey was co-ordinating help for policyholders injured during this tragic event.
“We saw people with awful penetrating wounds because that deep body of water that came also had a lot of bacteria and microbes in it,” she said. “These people were caught in this washing machine of filthy water and got a lot of penetrating wounds and really nasty infections because they were being pummelled along with cars and pieces of wood - it was awful.”
She said, initially, many of these injured customers were admitted into a hospital overseas. Harvey and her team would locate them and repatriate them back to Australia and organise their admission into local hospitals.
One positive feature of the travel assistance world, she said, is that it’s not a very big industry. In some cases, this helped speed up the assistance some policyholders received.
“The assistance world is a small world,” said Harvey. Hospital billing departments in Thailand, for example, would often contact World Travel Protection when they realised an injured person was one of their Australian customers.
“The billing departments are very good at identifying which cases are probably World Travel Protection and they will email us and say they potentially have one of our policyholders and ask if we can verify that,” she said. “We’d start liaising with the hospitals, getting medical reports and then if they are fit to travel, organise their return.”
This could be returning by economy or business class, or – if needed – an air ambulance.
Harvey said they took many 100s of calls in the few days following the Boxing Day tsunami - but not on the first day.
“There were a lot of people who couldn’t call us [on the first day] because of the damage that had been done and then we also got more calls from family members in Australia who couldn’t find somebody,” she said. “As soon as there was news coverage, our calls increased.”
After another major event of a very different kind, call volumes also went up suddenly.
“One thing like that can quadruple our call volumes just like that,” she said.
She was referring to the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States when terrorists seized passenger jets and crashed them into two New York skyscrapers, killing thousands.
Harvey wasn’t dealing with medical cases but the travel impact for her customers was huge.
“A lot of it, for us, was travel disruption, flight cancellations and then getting people home who obviously had planned for a holiday,” she said.
She said events like that can’t be dealt with by a conventional style of call centre.
“What we do is a very different type of call centre,” said Harvey. “It’s very bespoke and so I can’t just pull agency staff in, I really rely on the team and everyone does overtime.”
She said everyone takes calls.
“We split into a business as usual team and then a team that is just managing the crisis,” said Harvey. “This happens a lot, whether it’s due to an air traffic controller strike or the closing of an airport or a natural disaster.”
Rather than major catastrophes, most of Harvey’s customers are calling about more mundane issues. One challenge faced by travel insurance firms like World Travel Protection, she said, is educating people about travel risks.
“We all take it for granted that we are going on holiday and will have the most amazing time,” said Harvey. “No-one thinks they’re going on holiday and something bad’s going to happen.”
As a result, she said, travellers often don’t communicate about their movements or make copies of important documents.
“They don’t prepare as well as they should for a holiday in terms of documentation, who they have travel insurance with, or making a copy of their passport,” said Harvey. “So if they lose their phones, they’re a bit up the creek to be honest, because we keep everything on it these days.”
Her words of advice to anyone, including insurance industry stakeholders, planning to travel internationally over Christmas: “My key takeaway is tell someone where you’re going to be, give them a copy of your itinerary, passport and who you have travel insurance with.”
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