Interview

Expanding globalisation is not only increasing worldwide business opportunities for companies, but it is also increasing the risks for their travelling employees. Additionally, employers are attaching greater importance to the fact that they must care for their people.

Many mid-sized companies actually underestimate the risks of business trips in terms of health issues, accidents and criminal acts while abroad. With Business Travel Assistance, we help them to fulfil their duty to care for their travelling employees with a customised assistance and travel insurance concept.

For the most part, large corporations provide a portfolio of different solutions from numerous providers while we are now seeing a strong need to offer a simplified and consolidated approach with only a single provider. This is what our Business Travel Assistance offers.  Based on the "One call does it all" principle, with Business Travel Assist we are able to offer a consolidated approach. The result is streamlined, more efficient and better quality service for travellers and reduced costs for the company concerned.

Here are a few figures regarding Europe, the Middle East and Africa. In 2006 EMEA corporate travel amounted to € 450 billion. Roughly 30 per cent of this was accounted for by primary country markets. France, Germany and the UK alone spent a collective total of € 130 billion in corporate travel. These figures have continued to grow in the past few years.

At the same time corporate management teams are increasingly focused on keeping their employees satisfied due to the continuous battle to find, hire and retain the best talent. In the near future, employers will have to offer more than just enticing salary packages. They will have to think of implementing what we call employee assistance programs, which include safety packages for business trips. And with crises and conflicts on the rise in many parts of the world, companies are now legally obliged to secure their travelling employees with the best possible coverage while abroad. We are also witnessing increasing awareness of these stakes, challenges and opportunities in the corporate market, particularly from small and medium-sized companies. Of course, as I mentioned earlier, globalisation implies more frequent intercontinental trips and increased travel to remote, and often risky, locations.

Business Travel Assistance is driven by our expertise in understanding what Business Travel is all about. We specialise in solving emergency situations anywhere in the world, 24 hours a day.

Business Travel Assistance is about much more than just selling another policy. Part of our Business Travel Assistance offer is to actually assess the company’s business travel structure and then put a travel care program together that offers services targeted to each stage of the travel process: pre-travel, on-route and post-travel. These services include crisis management, destination training, a wide variety of assistance solutions, customised insurance schemes and even people tracking software solutions in case a crisis occurs somewhere in the world. We are also looking to finalise an agreement with another crisis management provider in order to be able to proactively inform our clients about the daily political and medical developments in crisis regions.