As an employer, you have a legal responsibility to protect your staff, whether they’re working from the office or travelling abroad. In order to safeguard employees during business trips, many organisations take out a company travel insurance premium – but the cost of these can vary greatly.
To help you balance the desire to protect staff with operational costs, Voyage Manager has looked into what impacts the cost of business insurance premiums – and how travel analytics tools can potentially help you to bring that price down, without compromising cover.
Protecting staff, everywhere in the world
With power comes responsibility – and for company directors, that responsibility means safeguarding staff wellbeing in all circumstance. As part of this, organisations must consider the impact of travel on employee safety, and every employer is required to take out liability insurance to cover the impact of a team member suffering an injury or illness while representing the company away from their place of work.
However, many companies choose to take out further business travel insurance policies, to cover them beyond the logistic and financial basics. Additional protection can include refunds for cancelled flights, and specialist repatriation services if a team member falls ill or gets injured during a work trip.
Another major benefit of taking out business travel insurance is that policies include medical cover beyond the standard, free support offered by European Health Insurance Cards (EHICs). Equally, staff travelling to countries where there is no free healthcare can be treated in the event of injury or illness, and you won’t be faced with a large medical bill at the end.
But corporate travel insurance comes at a cost – and that premium can be surprisingly high, if you’re guesstimating the level of cover needed to cover annual work-related trips.
Counting the cost of business travel insurance
The exact cost of your business insurance premium will depend on how many staff travel for work each year, to which parts of the world, and what they do on arrival. For example, a business meeting carries a lower risk than a physical activity-based team building exercise.
For companies with a large number of frequent travellers in your workforce, the cost of providing adequate insurance can add up; the top 10% of business travellers spend 88 days in hotels each year on average, and the equivalent to four weeks travelling by plane.
While many firms welcome the opportunity to reduce the cost of insurance, you need to ensure that any reductions will not compromise the level of cover your workforce requires. Negotiating this fine balance can only be achieved if you fully understand the complete nature of your annual business travel requirements – something that is achieved easiest and quickest through business travel tracking technology.
Using travel data to accurately track activity
To provide an accurate quote with the right level of cover, your business travel insurance provider needs to know how many trips were taken by your company in the last year. This includes how many days were spent in North America, Europe and the rest of the world; data that is not easily accessible within most companies.
If your business is using travel tracking software, however, you can pull up this information in an instant – and feel confident that the data you are sharing with the insurance company is accurate.
Travel data is especially easy to report on and share if your travel tracking technology provider offers built-in analytics tools. For example, Voyage Manager customers can use our analytics feature to break down staff movement by month, year or multiple years, segmented by country or state.
Providing this level of detail to insurance providers each time your policy is due for renewal means you can arrange adequate cover without paying for insurance you don’t need – and you have accurate data to shop around with, to secure a better value deal.
You may even want to use the data to discuss potential changes that will reduce your premium; from reducing the frequency of overseas trip, to limiting the number of people travelling for work, or the nature of company activities abroad.
Get the right cover at the right price using Voyage Manager travel analytics
When it comes to streamlining travel insurance costs, investing in corporate travel tracking software with built-in analytics tools is the simplest way to base your policy on accurate data.
Your main focus should be finding a premium that doesn’t break the bank, but which also provides sufficient cover, in the event that something happens during a business trip and a claim needs to be made.
Your main focus should be finding a premium that doesn’t break the bank, but which also provides sufficient cover, in the event that something happens during a business trip and a claim needs to be made.
To understand how travel tracking data analytics can reduce insurance premiums and other operational costs, book a free demo.
