Innovation crucial for travel recovery and insurance boost
Sebastian Kaisin, Head of The Global Network/Strategic Suppliers at MAPFRE Asistencia, spoke to ITIJ about why the travel and health insurance sector needs to boost investment in technology, share knowledge and leverage its position in the wider travel sector to help the industry recover faster
FITUR focus on technology in travel
The International Tourism Fair FITUR, the first face-to-face fair in the sector after the pandemic, was held in Madrid in May. During the event, the key concepts identified at a meeting organised by the United Nations World Tourism Organization’s (UNWTO) Affiliate Members Department were innovation and recovery.
The event featured international initiatives and projects that covered topics such as digitalisation, innovation, and marketing strategies to revive tourism and to achieve a safer, more inclusive and more sustainable sector when travel resumes. Marcelo Ricci, UNWTO Communications Director, commented: “The recovery of tourism and the economy in general must be based on innovation, sustainability and education. The transversal value to all of this is trust. Trust is the new currency, the currency of exchange, and it is something very concrete.”
In Spain, the government said it will invest almost €3,500 million in the digitalisation, sustainability and diversification of the tourism sector. The UNWTO stresses these values to lead a path to recovery and confidence.
At MAPFRE Asistencia, we are aware that our world has changed, and today we have the ability to move even closer to our clients thanks to innovation and new technologies. Our purpose is to be the strategic ally to our partners, enhancing their commercial proposal through service excellence, innovation and accessibility, adding value through digitalisation, integrating all parties’ capabilities, customer empowerment and data exploitation.
This is the reason we have not stopped working on adapting our value proposition, which, under the name of MiA (MAPFRE Intelligent Assistance), offers a 100-per-cent digital, multichannel and customer-oriented assistance solution, with geolocation services, monitoring and assessment.
We have been able to respond in record time during the pandemic, developing and putting in use digital health solutions facilitating people to continue benefiting from our services, launching 73 corporate agreements in 17 countries to more than 13 million people.
MAPFRE Asistencia is actively gathering information from best practices domestically, and identifying wider trends in the industry, focusing on improving the customer experience through intelligent automation services.
Let’s Connect is a program that has been designed in-house to transfer and share specific knowledge among all countries, granting them access to experiences on a monthly basis. This allows our various units and head office business experts to share their business experiences, adding value through scalable good practices.
Open innovation
Regarding the trend radar and new solutions, we leverage the capabilities offered by MAPFRE Open Innovation, the group’s innovation platform, which allows us to better understand the present and future challenges of the different markets in which we operate and find proposals that allow us to offer them solutions in areas such as on-off insurance, the ‘Uberisation’ of provider networks, indexed insurance and distribution models in non-traditional channels, digital health and wellness services or new mobility.
All of this, together with our 20 years’ experience in the travel industry, allowed us to build our MiA Travel value proposal. Designed both to complement the offer of partners and to be distributed individually, it offers solutions for the entire life cycle of our clients even before travelling, making the insurance proposal tangible through services designed to be used, with a 100-per-cent digital approach, self-service, relevance, and convenience.