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4 Reasons to Protect a Micro-cation from Travel Hiccups

Americans, and particularly Millennials, are taking more frequent and shorter trips—or “micro-cations”—according to the results of our recent survey. If the nature of vacations are changing, what does that mean for travelers’ protection needs?

Shorter trips can mean more domestic destinations or weekend getaways. Getting delayed by a day could mean missing nearly half their vacation, and there’s less time to deal with hassles like baggage delays. Addressing these issues, we cover four essential ways that trip insurance can protect your clients’ “micro-cations.”

1. Trip Cancellations

Unexpected illnesses are the number one reason for trips getting cancelled. If your client made substantial, non-refundable flight and hotel payments that they can’t risk losing, travel insurance can save their investment by reimbursing their prepaid expenses (up to the policy limit) for any covered reason.

2. Travel Delays

Whether it’s for a wedding, business meeting, or weekend getaway, your clients likely can’t afford to miss out on any part of their short trip. A weather delay or missed connection might cause them to miss an important event. If they will be delayed for 24 hours or more by their carrier due to a covered reason, we can reimburse the additional expense for your client to reach their destination sooner by alternative flights or transportation.

Additionally, we’ll help take the sting out of flight delays. Our innovative SmartBenefits™ can proactively pay $100 to each insured person in case of a covered flight delay (typically 3-5 hours, depending on the plan). Their plan may also reimburse lodging expenses for an unexpected overnight layover, up to the plan’s daily limit.

3. Baggage Protection

If your client is only traveling for a few days, there’s no time for nonsense like delayed or missing bags and equipment. All of our newest retail plans provide benefits when a bag delay exceeds 12 hours to reimburse customers for reasonable expenses on essential items, up to the specific plan limit, until their baggage arrives. For lost, damaged or stolen baggage, we can reimburse them for the actual value, repair or replacement of their items (whichever is less), within the limits of their plan. Note that all claims require a report filed with the appropriate authorities.

4. Pre-paid Tours and Activities

Your client may have booked tickets for Disney World, a dinner cruise or a special event, or fronted the green fees for a golf outing. If a covered travel delay causes them to lose out on their pre-paid, non-refundable tours or activities, insurance could help them recover their lost expenses.

3 Reasons Budget Travelers Can’t Afford to Pass on Insurance

Travelers look to their agent to help them get the best deals and experiences for a great price. One detail they should never skimp on is protecting their trip with an insurance plan. Below are three ways travel insurance can help cost-conscious consumers stay on budget while avoiding any large, unexpected financial burdens.

1. Budget for Planned Expenses—Not Surprises

Most customers can carve out 5-10% of their travel budget to protect their investment, but the cost of a last-minute international flight to return home to care for a sick family member? That might break the bank. Trip insurance minimizes risk to your customer, giving them peace of mind that an unforeseen event or emergency won’t create a financial hardship.

Take it from one of our customers who booked a vacation to Europe: “Just before that trip my husband fell, severed his quad, and required surgery. We had insurance and recovered all the money we had spent on that trip. We will never travel without insurance.”[1]

2. Avoid Devastating Medical Bills

It’s important to know that most U.S. health insurance plans and Medicaid won’t cover medical expenses abroad, which includes cruises. An emergency medical evacuation could cost anywhere from $10,000 to $100,000 or more out of pocket, depending on the location. Travel insurance can foot this bill, as well as your customer’s treatment costs for an injury, ambulance ride or hospitalization resulting from a covered medical emergency, for which many hospitals abroad otherwise often require up-front payments.

For the budget traveler going outside the U.S., it’s not worth the risk to their financial wellbeing or health to leave home without trip protection. The right emergency medical benefits can help prevent them from taking on massive credit card debt or wiping out their retirement savings to pay for costly medical bills.

3. Protect Their Vacation Savings

Some customers might be saving for months or years to afford a special family vacation, and of course they get emotionally invested in it. If at the last minute, an unexpected illness, injury or job loss causes them to cancel their plans, it doesn’t have to be a major loss. Recommending travel insurance can ensure your customers don’t lose out on their financial investment if they must cancel for a covered reason—which makes you the hero. Trip cancellation reimbursement is the most popular insurance benefit our customers use to safeguard their vacation savings, so they can reschedule when they’re able to travel again.

Another customer put it this way: “Price is right for the comfort of knowing you are covered in the unlikely event something happens and you have to cancel. My husband lost his job and without this coverage, we would have been in a real financial bind.”[2]

So the next time a customer declines travel insurance, either due to cost or doubting whether it’s worth it, remind them how it could save them a lot of money—and literally their vacation—if they purchase this travel essential.

 

Citation 1. Customer, August 2017
Citation 2. Customer, Jan. 2018

4 Ways Travel Protection Can Save Your Clients

With all the time, effort and care that goes into planning your clients’ trips, you wouldn’t want to leave it to chance everything will go as smoothly as you’ve promised them. We highlight the four most common travel disruptions that threaten to ruin the perfect getaway.

While we can’t predict the future either, our claims data provides the most likely scenarios that might cause unexpected trouble for your client’s trip. Help your client prepare for what could go wrong, so when it does, you look like the hero. When they check the box on insurance, they’re not just getting world-class travel protection and assistance, they’re buying peace of mind.

1. Trip Cancellation

Here’s a common scenario: David and Jennifer have booked their 10-year anniversary getaway, a 10-day bucket list tour of France and Italy. But their whole family goes down with the flu two days before their departure, causing them to postpone it. People getting sick before a trip is the number one culprit for cancellations. Thankfully travel insurance can reimburse the prepaid, non-refundable expenses (up to the policy limit) they would otherwise lose.

Often the illness of a family member or traveling companion, injury of the insured, or death of a family member causes a cancellation. Other covered reasons, depending on the plan, may include unexpected work commitments or common carriers stopping service due to severe weather.

2. Medical Emergencies

Not only are severe illnesses and injuries often the most expensive travel disasters, medical emergencies can also be extremely difficult to navigate outside of the U.S. Whether it’s a heart attack, food poisoning or serious fall covered by your plan, our 24/7 global assistance team can quickly help your client locate a medical facility by night or day, guarantee payment, consult on treatment options, and help them safely return home.

Many domestic health insurance plans and Medicare won’t cover your client abroad. If an emergency medical evacuation is needed, your client could be on the hook for transport costs ranging from $15,000 to over $100,000, depending on their condition and location in the world.

3. Trip Interruption

Often people don’t think about what might go wrong during their travel that could end it prematurely. For instance, empty nesters Jack and Linda are on a two-week Caribbean cruise when Linda slips in a stairwell and fractures her hip. Clients becoming ill or injured while traveling are the most common causes for a trip interruption. In addition to reimbursing the unused portion of their pre-paid, non-refundable expenses, trip interruption benefits can pay for reasonable transportation expenses—either to resume their journey or to return home early—for a covered reason.

Some people have to cut their vacation short due to an illness or passing of a family member. In other common scenarios, trip interruption can help with expenses related to common carrier delays or stopping of service due to severe weather.

4. Travel Delay

Your clients are likely to encounter a travel delay at some point, so why not protect them from the inevitable? Thanks to our innovative SmartBenefitsTM, a covered flight delay (3-5 hours, depending on the plan) can proactively pay $100 to each insured person for their inconvenience. For a more costly delay, insurance can cover additional travel expenses for a missed connection or boarding, or their lodging for an unexpected overnight layover.

Putting Customer Experience Above All Else

The key to growing your business is delivering exceptional customer service, and it’s ingrained in our company to help travel advisors do exactly that. It’s not luck that in the past year, we’ve won eight prestigious customer service awards and have been named the Best Travel Insurance Company by five top industry organizations including Travel Weekly–awards that we’ve won year after year.

Often in travel, and especially with insurance, you get what you pay for, so choose wisely when considering a company and their reputation for customer service. As you know, it’s always worth having great, accessible assistance when something bad happens. Our secret sauce is in providing trustworthy travel protection that customers understand and love, and making it easy for them to use their benefits to put money back in their pockets. Every day we’re focused on doing the right thing for your customer, which helps both of us gain more repeat business and brand loyalty.

Transparent, Useful Benefits

We help customers better understand their insurance benefits. Insurance can be complicated, but it doesn’t have to be for your customers. That’s why we purposefully simplified descriptions of benefits, covered reasons and limits on Allianz Travel Insurance plans, making it easier for customers to understand which situations may be covered.

We also remind customers what their insurance benefits are and ways to access emergency travel assistance by sending them an email days before their trip. We provide travel advisors with extensive training and sales support to assist them in offering the best matched products that satisfy each customers’ needs.

Protection that Evolves

We continually improve our products to protect your customers. Travel disruptions and traveler needs are constantly evolving around the world, so our products do too. We monitor ongoing customer feedback through our Voice of Customer program—surveying about 20,000 customers a week—to obtain real-time, actionable insights on customer pain points, preferences, satisfaction, and market opportunities.

This customer feedback informs product development to expand the list of useful benefits and covered reasons that can protect your customers from unexpected travel hazards. An example of this is the pre-existing medical conditions waiver for trip cancellation that we’ve added to nearly all our products. We don’t see any other travel insurance company coming close to this level of customer-centricity in their product development.

Convenient Claims & Quick Payments

We make it easier for customers to file claims and get paid. Filing an insurance claim doesn’t have to be slow or complicated. We’re constantly innovating to deliver a better, faster and more convenient process than the industry standard.

We launched proactive claims payments through SmartBenefitsTM, which puts money back in customers’ wallets after a qualifying flight delay— typically $100 per person impacted by the delay. We’ve also made claims for travel and bag delays easier by giving customers the option to receive a faster, fixed-amount payment for their inconvenience, without the effort of uploading receipts.

We’ve reduced claims documentation requirements plus streamlined processing and payments using automation, which have shortened our average claims lifecycle to 7 business days for claims submitted with all required documentation. By eliminating the doctor’s form requirement on trip cancellation claims related to pre-existing medical conditions, we removed another barrier for customers to get paid more quickly.

Customers can file and manage their claim online or through our award-winning TravelSmartTM mobile app. Now we’re developing SMS notifications to keep customers regularly informed as their claim progresses through the stages to approval and payment. And since we’re committed to providing superior 24/7 customer service, our in-house call staff is available by phone, email, chat and social media channels.

All these factors contribute to us maintaining a 96% customer satisfaction rating. If you want your customers to have the great trip, you have to give them the best. And to us, that means the relentless pursuit of the best customer experience possible.

A Carefree Spring Break Starts With Travel Insurance

Spring break adventure in the woods

Cancun and Orlando top the list of spring breakers’ most popular domestic and international destinations in 2019. Beach towns in Mexico, including San Jose Del Cabo and Puerto Vallarta, are among the hottest spots abroad this spring, according to our customer survey.

For many students and families, spring break is a chance to get away from the winter slump, relax in the sun, and explore a new or favorite destination. However, no spring break getaway is immune to travel interruptions, cancelled flights, unexpected illness or injuries, and other crises that can throw a wrench in their trip. Here are some common ones—and why travel insurance is practical.

Travel Delays and Lost Baggage

There are many ways travel insurance and assistance can rescue your clients from a potential nightmare spring break while protecting their investment. Winter storms can wreak havoc on flight schedules. Trip insurance can cover additional expenses related to covered travel delays or layovers, as well as lost or delayed bags packed with your clients’ favorite beach gear or ski equipment, up to their policy limits.

Cancelled and Interrupted Trips

If your client, their family member or a traveling companion catches a severe winter cold or gets injured before the trip, causing them to cancel, Allianz Travel Insurance plans may reimburse their lost, non-refundable travel expenses for a covered, unforeseen reason. If your client’s vacation ends early due to a covered illness, or the covered illness or death of a family member, we may reimburse their lost, non-refundable expenses and cover their travel expenses to get back home, up to their policy limits. This can provide valuable peace of mind and financial security, especially for expensive trips involving the whole family.

Emergency Medical Care

Trip insurance can help protect your clients during their spring break as well. Food poisoning, pneumonia, sudden illnesses, injuries or car accidents can send your clients to the hospital, facing uncertainty with quality of care where they can’t speak the local language. Since most U.S. healthcare plans and Medicare won’t cover medical expenses abroad, don’t let your client get stuck with the bill. Our 24/7 global assistance can help them find pre-screened, high-quality medical care and can often guarantee payment up front.

Coverage Exclusions

We want your clients to have a fun, carefree spring break, and trip protection can offer added peace of mind. Just caution them about the risks of alcohol consumption and extreme sports, which can exclude them from insurance coverage.

Allianz Travel Insurance plans clearly state that travelers are not covered for any loss that results directly or indirectly from the use or abuse of alcohol or drugs, or any related physical complications. Also excluded are injuries that result from participating in extreme, high-risk sports like skydiving, hang gliding, parasailing, bungee jumping, caving, backcountry skiing, and scuba diving below 120 feet.

Wherever your clients are headed this spring break, to the beach or the city, help them travel smart and safely by protecting their experience with trip insurance.

5 Reasons Clients Decline Travel Insurance—But Shouldn’t

airport flight delay mom and daughter

Some clients won’t understand the value of travel insurance the first time you offer it. As their travel advisor, you have the opportunity to educate them on the benefits, help them see through common misperceptions, and present real scenarios in which travel protection can save their trip. Here are five common objections paired with responses to better inform your clients why travel insurance is a smart choice.

1. “My credit card includes travel insurance.”

Response: Most credit card benefits offer only limited coverage that varies, and you may not be covered at all depending on the circumstances.
Travel insurance plans offer more extensive benefits like trip interruption, higher reimbursement limits, and typically more than 25 covered reasons for trip cancellation on plans with pre-departure benefits. An insurance plan can reimburse you for additional travel expenses due to some common travel disruptions, such as a covered travel delay or lost/delayed baggage.

2. “I’m young and healthy, so I don’t need it.”

Response: What if your spouse, child or traveling companion gets sick or injured, or your destination is impacted by a natural disaster?
Travel insurance is designed to protect you from unexpected circumstances that are out of your control. Some of the covered reasons typically include sickness or death of an immediate family member, jury duty, employee transfer, and if your home or destination becomes uninhabitable due to a natural disaster. Even if young and healthy, nearly one-third of Millennials plan to buy travel protection in the next year.1

3. “I’m covered by my health insurance plan.”

Response: Many domestic health insurance plans don’t cover medical expenses abroad.
“Foreign medical facilities and providers require cash payment up front and do not accept U.S. insurance plans. Medicare does not provide coverage outside of the United States,” the U.S. State Department warns.2 And that includes cruises, where you’re traveling in international waters. Even if your plan includes some coverage outside your home state, you’re likely to pay significant out-of-network expenses. And if you require an emergency medical evacuation outside the country, your out-of-pocket expenses without travel insurance can range from $25,000 to $100,000 or more, depending on the location.

4. “It’s just added cost with no benefit.”

Response: Travel insurance can more than pay for itself with reimbursement of expenses, in cases like covered travel delays, lost luggage, unexpected trip cancellations, and medical emergencies.
You hope you never have to use it, but when you need it, insurance can save you up to thousands of dollars in non-refundable trip expenses or additional travel expenses for covered events. With Allianz Travel Insurance, you get access to Frommers city guides, the TravelSmart app with emergency contacts and maps to locate nearby medical clinics worldwide, SmartBenefits that can proactively pay you after a covered travel delay, 24/7 global assistance, and more. Insurance plans are affordable, costing only 5-10% of your total trip.

5. “Nothing ever happens to me.”

Response: You can’t predict severe weather, a family illness, or a medical emergency.
Travel insurance can be a wise investment to protect your health and financial wellbeing against unforeseen circumstances that wreak havoc on your travel plans. Flight delays and lost/delayed baggage are common, everyday occurrences, in which travel insurance can put money back in your pocket. Most of all, travel protection can give you peace of mind, knowing that whatever life throws your way, Allianz Travel Insurance is there to help.

 

Citations:
1. “Portrait of American Travelers,” MMGY Global, 2017.
2. Travel.state.gov

3 Insurance Benefits Every Cruise Client Should Have

Cruises are for travelers seeking relaxation, convenience, and fun exploring new destinations—sometimes with the whole family. So the last thing you want is your client stressing about whether they’ll lose out on their large investment when a last-minute event threatens their travel plans. We highlight three must-have benefits that cruise travel protection can offer to cover your client when things go wrong.

With the added peace of mind of knowing they’re protected, your client can enjoy the perfect cruise with their loved ones. The three essential benefits of travel insurance include:

1. Reimbursement for Last-minute Cancellations

A family illness may cause your client to skip their cruise, but they don’t have to lose their investment. Allianz Travel Insurance plans offer a wide range of covered reasons that can fully reimburse your clients’ prepaid, non-refundable, cruise expenses lost due to an unforeseen event, such as a covered illness or injury of yourself, a travel companion or your family member. Other covered events may include a covered natural disaster striking your home, or missing your cruise because of a covered traffic accident enroute to the airport.

2. SmartBenefits for Travel Delay

Weather-related flight delays, missing a connection and lost bags can capsize your client’s cruise vacation. If your client misses the boat due to a covered travel delay, our insurance plans can reimburse them for the cost of alternative transportation to the next port of call to catch up with the ship—so they don’t miss out on their entire vacation. If your client has a covered, unexpected layover, insurance benefits can reimburse them for eligible hotel accommodations, meals and lost prepaid expenses, up to their daily limit. In the case of a qualifying flight delay, our new SmartBenefitsSM can proactively pay your client a fixed amount.

3. Emergency Medical Benefits

Medical emergencies are more common than you may think on cruises, from serious falls to life-threatening illnesses, like this recent example. The right insurance plan can quickly get your client off the ship to a high-quality, intensive care medical facility and guarantee payment for any covered medical emergencies.

Since most U.S. health care plans won’t pay outside the country, travel insurance medical benefits can prevent huge out-of-pocket expenses for your client, including costs for covered emergency medical transportation that can quickly total tens of thousands of dollars. Plus, your client will have access to our 24/7 global assistance for emergency or travel issues that arise. Furthermore, trip interruption benefits can help your client return home early, in case of a sudden covered illness of a family member at home.

Talk to your clients about the benefits of travel insurance—and help their cruise go as smoothly as possible.

5 Winning Strategies for Selling Travel Protection

As you’re setting your business goals and strategies for the 2019 travel season, remember that Allianz Global Assistance is always here as your partner to assist you in growing your business successfully. We want to help you book more trips, keep your clients happy, and increase your insurance sales.

Our sales team has compiled a list of best practices that many top selling agents use when offering travel insurance to their clients. Two common themes are to introduce the benefits of travel insurance early, and make it one of your essential check-list items for planning a memorable trip.

1. Become the Expert on One Plan

Agents are more effective at selling travel insurance when they focus on one primary plan and practice selling it often to their core clients. As you get better at clearly explaining the value and most useful benefits of an insurance plan, your clients are more likely to understand it too. Our most popular plans offer benefits that cover the most common travel disruptions at an appealing price point.

2. Explain Benefits with Real Scenarios

Travelers don’t want to think about something going wrong. So as their travel advisor, it’s your job to protect their trip experience. Describe common or real-life scenarios that could lead to travel delays, missing bags, cancelled trips due to family illnesses, or other travel disruptions that you or your clients have encountered. Using real examples to show when travel insurance could save them up to thousands of dollars enables clients see the real value in it. They’ll pause to consider what they think might go wrong on their trip and how insurance can cover them in those situations.

Then use social proof to reinforce the decision—talk about why your clients buy it. You might even gather and share testimonials from happy clients who’ve filed a claim with us and been reimbursed for their travel expenses.

3. Talk About the Allianz Advantage

Not every insurance is created equal, and some travelers may be wary of purchasing optional insurance. Tell your clients why you trust Allianz Global Assistance to help them with 24/7 global assistance in case of an emergency. Share a story about how Allianz Global Assistance served one of your clients with excellent customer service or cared for a traveler who got sick abroad, calling daily to check up on them while paying their covered medical bills.

They trust you, so your heartfelt, professional recommendation can go a long way in reassuring them that we’ll have their back when things go wrong. And we’ll always do the right thing for them.

4. Simplify and Personalize the Reason to Buy

Make it an easy decision by simplifying the reason: they’ll have greater peace of mind when traveling to a new, unknown destination. By understanding what worries your client, you can personalize your pitch to them. Maybe they have a pre-existing medical condition, or they’re traveling to the Caribbean during hurricane season. Find the most compelling single reason and sell them on that.

5. Request a Waiver if They Decline

It is best practice to ask your client to sign a waiver acknowledging that they decline travel insurance. This may cause some people to pause and think twice about the potential protection benefits they’re giving up. Offer insurance again right before making their travel reservation and when they make a payment, which are often when your client’s doubts surface about their ability to go on the trip.

We wish you a happy and prosperous year in 2019, and safe travels to all your clients. Let us know if there’s anything we can do to help, and feel free to contact us if you need any training or sales materials.

How to Maximize Engagement on Social Media

social media phone

What’s more important than planning enough content to share on social media? Get to know your audience inside and out so you can reach the right demographics on each social site. Generation Z and Millennials are avid users of Twitter and Instagram, while Baby Boomers and Generation X lean towards Facebook. How does that match up with your target audience?

Each social site offers various free tools such as Facebook Insights that can shed light on where to find and engage with travelers. Or you can purchase subscriptions from sites such as Sprout Social, Buffer, or others for a more thorough analysis and to better target social users with tailored content.

Adapt Your Strategy for Each Social Channel

The million dollar question for everyone on social media is, “How do you want your audience to interact with your content, and how do you get them to engage?”  It depends on the platform and your clientele.

Facebook: As the largest social media site, Facebook is great for inspiring your clients to venture to places they wouldn’t normally travel. Post beautiful pictures of people enjoying their travels or taking unique adventures to help spark conversation among your audience, like examples on our Facebook page. This in turn can also inspire your clientele to share their travel tips, which also does well on Facebook. Allocating a small budget to boost your posts is a great idea, since the current algorithm limits businesses’ reach in users’ social feeds.

Twitter: Twitter is a highly engaging platform where people would rather have conversations with you as opposed to being directly sold your product. Thanks to an increase in character limit to 280, you can share more information regarding what your business does, links to travel news, blog posts, and articles, as well as participate in Twitter chats relevant to your brand. You can find numerous travel advisor Twitter chats like #TravelHappy and #TravelSkills simply by searching for them with hashtags. Hashtags are important here if you want to be found in the Twittersphere. According to Travel Market Report, adding a hashtag or two can make your tweet 33% more engaging.1

Instagram: A study reported on by Forbes has shown that over 40% of Instagrammers use the platform to search for their next travel destination, making it exceedingly beneficial to you as a travel advisor.2 Instagrammers love user-generated and behind-the-scenes content, so posting travel photos or videos from you or your staff can spur engagement. With the permission of your clients, you can even share photos from their vacations and tell how you helped inspire their adventure. Include a quote from them about how your influence changed the way they travel. Hashtags are also king on Instagram. You can use a maximum of 30 hashtags, however 7-10 hashtags are optimal. Research which hashtags will help your photos standout among the millions of images within the platform—some examples are #travelagent and #travel_captures. There are free hashtag websites to help you do this.

Test Posting Times and Frequency

You can experiment with how often and when you post during the week, depending on your audience per platform. Below are general times when users are typically the most active and engaged, which offer a starting point. Remember to tailor this to your audience as you learn more about the demographics of your clientele on each site.

  • Facebook: Monday-Friday, 9am-2pm
  • Twitter: Monday-Friday 9am-1pm
  • Instagram: Monday-Friday 5am, 9am-4pm

You can also follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to gain inspiration for travel content to share on your accounts. Learn more social media tips in our Travel Agent’s Guide to Social Media Marketing.

For more resources and tools to step up your marketing strategy, download our 2018 Agent Marketing Guide.

 

Citations:

1. “12 Top Tips For Travel Agents Using Social Media,” Travel Market Report, June 2017
2. “Here’s How Much Instagram Likes Influence Millennials’ Choice Of Travel Destinations,” Forbes, January 2018

Millennial Families, the New Travelers to Watch

Millennial family travel

If you saw growth in travel spending plateau this past summer, you’re not alone. Our 2018 Vacation Confidence Index predicted flat growth for summer vacation spending in 2018. However, summer spend was still expected to top $100 billion for the second year in a row.

The biggest trend we’ve seen is a shift to more domestic vacations and fewer international trips, likely driven by the increased safety risks of traveling abroad. For this reason, Americans are looking for advisors to suggest popular and exciting domestic destinations with major attractions in cities that have a lot to offer

Millennial Families Traveling More Than Ever

The hot spot in today’s consumer travel market comes from not just Millennials but Millennial families, who now make up half of their generation. In 2017 these families spent an average of $5,300 on vacations, which added $50 billion to the leisure travel market. Surprisingly, Millennials with kids are traveling and spending significantly more. In contrast, spending by those without kids—couples and singles—has and may continue to decrease. Millennial families say they’ll spend nearly 40 percent more than couples on vacation and nearly 90 percent more than singles in the next year.1

So think about that young couple you helped book their honeymoon at an all-inclusive Mexico resort a couple years ago. You might want to pitch them on the idea of a week-long beach vacation with their toddler to Fort Lauderdale.

As Millennial families juggle work demands, young children, and family life, unexpected events can easily arise that disrupt their travel plans. An annual study by MMGY called “Portrait of American Travelers” shows that Millennials are the generation most likely to protect their trips today, with a slight increase expected in the year ahead.2 And as you might expect, Baby Boomers are the next biggest demographic that buys trip protection.

How do you position travel protection to a Millennial or Millennial parent? Like the majority of travelers, they’re concerned about having to cancel their trip, particularly due to an illness or to take care of a sick family member, so Trip Cancellation benefits are important. Younger travelers also are concerned with what might happen during their vacation, such as flight delays and baggage loss or delays.3

As the Millennial family demographic grows, travel agencies and advisors should be thinking about how they can optimize their marketing efforts to reach this crucial, growing segment.

 

Citations:
1. Portrait of American Travelers, MMGY Global, 2017
2. Portrait of American Travelers, MMGY Global, 2017
3. Allianz proprietary research, July 2018