About Us
Travel Insurance Compared is owned and operated by Naked Logic and tenderly manicured by its editor.
The Travel Insurance Compared editor has a diverse background in online journalism, web standards, usability and interaction design. Over the past five years he has focused on delivering simple and intuitive online solutions to complex problems for clients such as Toyota, Solution 6, MYOB and Federal Publishing.
For more information on Naked Logic please visit www.nakedlogic.com.au or contact the editor at
Our objective
The aim of the Travel Insurance Compared website is a simple one: we want to make it easy for you (the customer) to choose a travel insurance provider.
We draw on the expertise of five industry professionals with over ten years experience producing successful e-Business projects. Our concise reviews provide a simple, independent and standardised method for comparing potential travel insurance providers.
Philosophy
The crew at Travel Insurance Compared is very interested in the web. Specifically, in proving the web can live up to its own potential. With the arrival of genuinely successful e-Business ventures, the web is beginning to prove that a thriving business can be created and sustained purely through online channels.
But now it's time to forget all the technical jargon and focus on the customer.
Disclaimer
The reviews published on Travel Insurance Compared are the personal views of the editor and are born of a strict methodology (see below) developed over the past ten years. We encourage you to comment (especially if you disagree with our assessment) by posting your observations and experiences at the foot of the relevant review.
We make no recommendations as to which product or level of cover is better or more suitable - just which providers offer the best customer experience.
How we rate the sites
The criteria outlined below summarise the detailed methodology that each member of the Travel Insurance Compared team strictly follows when conducting a review.
- Ease of use
The team at Travel Insurance Compared is passionate about usability, web standards and accessibility. Many of the problems we encounter when reviewing websites stem from the sites being designed and built by insurance companies with little thought about the customer. Furthermore, many of the websites are built using old technology such as frames, nested tables and proprietary code rendering them inaccessible to large chunks of online customers.
- Speed
The speed of page-load is an essential ingredient to a good customer experience. The importance of speed is heightened when processing credit card transactions while the nervous customer (sometimes a first time e-commerce user) waits for the page to load. However, not all the providers we have reviewed offer online transactions, so Travel Insurance Compared uses the speed the homepage loads as the basis for this criterion.
- Reliability
The reliability of a website is an essential ingredient to a good customer experience. Not unlike speed, the importance of reliability is heightened when processing credit card transactions while the nervous customer (sometimes a first time e-commerce user) waits to see what happens.
- Customer Service
There is nothing worse than calling up or sending an email 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 industryÉ which is good!
Travel Insurance Compared had to devise a standardised set of attributes to measure the level of customer service of travel insurance providers. As we're reviewing websites, we decided to measure the response time of customer service departments when they receive the two most common questions from an online customer - via email and phone.
- Communication
Writing in a style and tone that users and customers can understand and use to accomplish their goals on a website should be self-evident. However, the team at Travel Insurance Compared frequently comes across examples of poor communication that can hinder and sometimes prevent a customer from completing a transaction.
- e-Commerce Security
Providing a secure gateway for payment transactions is only one piece of providing a secure e-commerce customer experience. While a verified digital certificate is essential for a secure gateway, communicating the attributes of the secure environment is just as important.
As a large percentage of customers are still unsure about making payments online, travel insurance providers need to be very clear about the environment in which they're collecting your credit card details. Furthermore, it's vital that they outline the steps in the process that follow you hitting the ÔSubmit' button.
- Financial Rating
All travel insurance providers are underwritten by a larger organisation that covers the providers the risk of exposure in the event of a claim being made that they cannot cover. So we rate the providers on who they're underwritten by and the financial standing of that underwriter. Obviously the big names are more respectable than some tiny underwriter in Malta you know nothing about.
- Range
This criterion examines both the range of insurance products available to the customers alongside the range of customers these policies will service.
With this criterion, the team at Travel Insurance Compared are looking for a wide range of products, but more importantly is the Ôcustomisability' of the products available to the customer.
- Online Flexibility
What happens once the customers have bought a policy? What kind of service is offered and promoted on the site?
The team at Travel Insurance Compared believe the presentation, communication and usability of the service once the policy has been purchase crucial to a goof user experience and to a good ranking.
- Online claims
Online claims are very similar (and somewhat of an addition) to online extensions.
While not every piece of the claims process can be completed online - documentation such as receipts will always have to be faxed / posted - the entire claims process can be streamlined and enhanced by some simple online mechanisms.
If you would like more detail about the topics referred to in this outline feel free to contact us to garner some further information.
