As international travel resumes, the extent to which COVID-19 has impacted the global aviation industry is becoming increasingly clear. The sector was one of the hardest hit by the pandemic, as highlighted by Allianz’s recent report into the aviation space which revealed that two-thirds of global commercial aircraft were grounded in April 2020, with passenger traffic down 90% year on year.
Whether international travel will ever hit the heights of pre-COVID levels again is a question being debated by experts in the market and a common consensus has yet to be reached. Yet despite the righteous raising of concerns and eyebrows over the government’s ‘traffic light’ system on air travel and the increasing furore over the costs involved with COVID testing, it appears the aviation industry is slowly rebounding as traffic volumes continue to uptick.
For those insurance brokers who navigate the often-tempestuous waters of offering services related to travel, the increased number of domestic travellers brings with it a variety of concerns and considerations, after so many months of inactivity.
If there is a common theme to be found in the changing expectations consumers have when purchasing insurance, it seems that it is that the average insurance professional is now called on not just to be a jack-of-all-trades, but a master-of-all-trades.
Whether it’s relating to cyber coverage, professional indemnity risk, or intellectual property concerns, COVID seems to have engineered the expectation that a broker will occupy a ‘Renaissance man’ role, delivering expert advice on a seemingly endless stream of subjects. It’s a distinct concern for brokers working in smaller, more regional businesses who cannot afford the luxury of specialisation and one that will need to be addressed going forward.
To offset this, many insurance companies looking to support their brokers have done so through a variety of services – whether that’s investing in tech-led new infrastructure that frees up more time for their broker partners, providing training sessions, or producing thought leadership reports that simplify the pain points of a specific product line.
But as brokers know, this is only one side of the equation and the other side is a lot more cumbersome.
COVID has represented a time where we each need to take responsibility for the information we imbibe, from the media outlets we support, to the research associations we trust, to the posts we share online. Misinformation has abounded during COVID while factual information has proven that if it is packaged in an unwieldy or inaccessible format it is of little more use, and almost as much harm, as its counterpart.
Travel is an area where consumers have found themselves flooded with far too much, often inconsistent, information and thus it makes sense that travel insurance customers will be looking for updates they can trust and the data to back that up. The good news for brokers is that this information is available, the bad news is that it is a time-consuming and laborious task to analyse the huge amount of data available and then disseminate that to a broad customer base.
To further complicate matters, insurance brokers are faced not simply with having to navigate the swathe of updates, corrections and clarifications issued from the government with regards to international travel, but also with the changing narrative regarding what is and is not covered by travel insurance providers. Across the global insurance market, major cruise lines have announced a raft of updates regarding the voyage of unvaccinated passengers.
Only recently, Carnival Cruise Line joined its competitor Royal Caribbean in requiring all unvaccinated guests to purchase a travel insurance policy before they can come aboard. Meanwhile, earlier this year in the UK, the specialist travel insurance provider Insurancewith.com incorporated UK cruise cover into its Staycation Plus policy in response to the rising demand for ‘seacations’.
The role that travel plays in our lives has only been accentuated by COVID – whether that’s travelling for pleasure after a year and a half without holidays, or travelling to see loved ones after a year and a half without contact, or travelling to meet professional colleagues and peers you may not yet have had the pleasure of meeting face to face. And so it stands to reason that insurance brokers will inevitably have to play an essential role in helping their clients navigate the complexity of international travel.
But brokers cannot and should not be put in a position of being all things to all men - that way exhaustion lies. If they are arming themselves with the right information and using that to protect their clients to the best of their abilities that is enough – so, essentially if you find yourself endlessly refreshing the NHS’s international travel guidelines, it might be the time to book yourself some time away…
