Travel Insurance Guide |
Travel Insurance Price Comparison |
Comparing Travel Insurance |
Travel Insurance Quick Quote |
Travel Insurance Guide |
Travel Insurance Price Comparison |
Comparing Travel Insurance |
Travel Insurance Quick Quote |
The reviews that appear are the views of 5 internet industry professionals who have been designing and building online e-businesses for over 10 years. Combined we have over 50 years of experience, so we think we know what a good web site means. We have also done more than $50 million of e-business, so we know about e-commerce and security. You are welcome to disagree, as these are just our personal views, and you can post your comments on the site if you wish. We make no recommendation as to which product, service or level of cover is better or more suitable, just which works best. Enjoy.
We use the following ten criteria to rate web sites. Each gets a score from 1 to 10 which gives the total review score. We try to keep the reviews current, so if you notice that a site review is not current, please contact us.
The criteria:
Simple. Which site offers the lowest price we can find.
Not so simple. What you get for what price. Often cheap does not equate to good value. We have tried to assess this balance across the range of products offered by any one company.
We are passionate about usability and customer experience and just can't understand how people manage to make web sites so difficult to use. Part of the problem is that many of these sites have been designed by people from the insurance industry and not by their customers, which means they are designed from the industry out, not from the customer in. maybe they'll get it together one day.
For more on usability look at: http://www.useit.com
This is who is the underwriter and what is their financial standing. Obviously the big names are more respectable that some tiny underwriter in Malta that you've never heard of.
This is the partner to ease of use. How a site communicates to its customers, what language they use, how it has been written, and can you read it. Some of the industry terminology is plain awful, not to mention tiny font sizes that are hard to read for many of us.
If a web site isn't FAST, forget it. Just ask people why they use Google. Response times are everything. there aren't many of us these days who will wait for more than a few seconds for a page to display or we're off to the next site.
Many people are still unsure about making payments online. Actually, these days it isn't difficult to make payments by credit card securely, but this is score is a check to see if the transaction is secure, if there is a secure certificate in place and what the likely chances are of your credit card being debited multiple times. A transaction should either be cleared with the bank immediately or not, and you should NEVER purchase from a site where they store your credit card details.
There is nothing worse than calling up or sending an e-mail and never getting a reply. Just ask anyone who has had to ask something of a large corporate, only to be put in a phone queue or passed off to some call-centre in India. Actually, most of the services were very good, which is probably the result of travel insurance being such a competitive industry.
Which is good!
Some customers need to extend their policies while they are away. Some companies let you do this, and some don't. Of those that do, some do it by telephone, some by fax, and some by email and one online. We have heard of several cases of emails and faxes going missing, customers thinking they are covered, having to make a claim ... only to discover that the fax/email "got lost" and there was no record of it.
The same with online claims. Since travel insurance is actually about emergencies and claims (rather than sales) we are amazed that so few companies have online claims systems. Most seem to expect you to fill out a paper form and post it off, which, given that online travel insurance is more than 8 years old is disgraceful. More so for the large successful companies who should have put some of their profits back into providing good online customer services.
This is how Jeff Bezos has been so successful with Amazon. http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/85/bezos_1.html
