ITIC APAC 2026 | Travel trends and their impact on assistance

The ITIJ team are reporting from ITIC APAC in Singapore this week (15–17 June 2026), sharing the discussions that take place at the conference. Read all reports.

Alex Besson, Founder, Aware24

Besson began by highlighting the growing demand for non-traditional travel, including adventure, wellness, diving, trekking, and slow travel.

“It’s an opportunity, and from a tourism perspective it’s extraordinary,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong, 20 years ago these destinations did exist, but more people are going there now.”

He stated that as a result of this rapidly diversifying landscape, “tourism is increasingly reaching places where emergency services never followed” and tourists themselves are rapidly outpacing the networks meant to support them.

Besson highlighted the dissonance between the desires of tourists, who wish for “remote, authentic, experiential, and off-the-beaten-track” trips, and those of assistance firms, who typically have to navigate limited infrastructure, healthcare, rescue capabilities, and complex logistics to support such travellers.

Most critically, he said, were “last-mile challenges”, where locating the patient is easy, but reaching them and retrieving them is hard.

Besson emphasised the importance of “local knowledge, trusted partners, operational flexibility, and human relationships” to overcome such challenges, with a focus on “depth over breadth”.

Whereas assistance firms have traditionally measured their network by the number of countries, providers, and hospitals they have, he argued that more pertinent questions relate to operational reach. These include: “Who responds outside cities? Who answers at 2am? Who knows the local terrain and authorities?”

“The question is not ‘Do you have a provider in this area?’, it’s ‘Can your provider actually reach the patient and organise things in a very difficult situation?’,” he said.

Besson concluded that it was only through these kinds of questions that assistance firms could maintain and justify readiness in areas where volumes are not high, but where travellers are inevitably going to go. 

Talbot Henry, Head of Travel, Asia Pacific, Verisk

Henry began by focusing on the growing international demand for travel – accelerated both by older travellers being more adventurous, and by younger travellers making travel a focus of their savings – driven in part by many living with their parents for longer.

He noted, however, that younger travellers were also statistically the least likely to purchase travel insurance.

“People are travelling a lot. Post-Covid, there is a lot more travel going on, especially in southeast Asia,” Henry noted. “We’re talking about places like Singapore and Hong Kong. So whereas pre-Covid, maybe an average of two to three times a year, they’re now travelling maybe five to six times a year.”

He added: “And as I say, they’re travelling at an older age. So whereas previously you’d turn about 70 years of age, and largely stick to domestic travel, now people are going away for their 70th or 80th birthdays.”

Alongside this is a burgeoning desire from many holidaymakers for new experiences, including travel to remote locations or more daring activities such as extreme sports.

The result of these trends, Henry stated, is that “travel is more expensive, and also poses greater risks to insurers”.

This is especially true as transportation and accommodation costs continue to rise, with expensive deposits being required further in advance for trip costs, as well as the rise in geopolitical tensions resulting in periodic “mass cancellation events” such as those caused by the ongoing war in the Middle East.

As a consequence, Henry noted that many insurers had begun charging more for cancellation coverage – but questioned: “Is it enough?”

He argued that the combined trends of more expensive trips and more elderly people travelling with comorbidities often meant a higher rate of expensive claims.

Camilo Saraiva, Vice President, Medical and Assistance Services, Divers Alert Network (DAN)

Saraiva focused on the reality of responding to diving emergencies in the APAC region. He stated that there was a growing gap between tourist demand and emergency system readiness to support divers, noting that most diving in the region was focused around remote island systems with poor healthcare options.

“This represents a very long way to get them out,” he said. “The boat or plane that you took to get there – that’s the same boat or plane you’ll need to get out. And sometimes this can take three days of navigation just to get there and back.”

He noted that Indonesia dominates DAN’s case volume in APAC, with 77% of all cases originating there. Saraiva said: “Indonesia is not just a dive destination, it is a live stress test for remote medical assistance systems.”

Alongside this, tourism volume continues to rise, with many older, higher-risk travellers – many of whom have various comorbidities – staying active longer and participating in activities such as diving.

The result of this convergence of trends is “higher operational complexity and cost exposure for assistance companies,” he explained.

Beyond this, Saraiva highlighted the unique afflictions that assistance firms will typically encounter when responding to diving excursions gone wrong – in particular, “decompression sickness (DCS), arterial gas embolism (AGE), and barotrauma”.

Such afflictions – especially AGE and DCS – require urgent treatment and specialised equipment such as recompression chambers when they occur, due to their potentially fatal nature.

However, he added that just because such chambers were known to exist nearby, that did not mean they were currently operational – posing an additional challenge for assistance firms. To overcome such challenges, Saraiva emphasised the importance of “chamber databases, hotline triage and provider relationships”.