KarryOn chats to Southern Cross Travel Insurance’s (SCTI) CEO, Craig Morrison about how the provider is keeping premiums down and what Aussies are doing wrong when it comes to insurance.
1. What sets SCTI apart from other insurers?
Some of the big differences are that we don’t sell through any other intermediaries – we only sell online and we’re completely paperless. This helps keeps our premiums down. We don’t ask for anybody’s postal address, we only communicate via email, which again keeps premiums down.
Another thing is that unlike our competitors we’re both the travel insurance distributor and provider. It’s our capital at risk but unlike our competitors we don’t need to ask anyone’s permission to pay a claim. We make all the decisions ourselves, which is quite unique.
Being completely online, it also means that all our conversations are recorded. So if there was ever a conversation about heart problems then we’d have documentation to support it. Additionally, it only takes a couple of minutes to complete and we have online medical screening. So we don’t make any of our clients go to the doctor.
Is the market saturated with insurance distributors?
We see new entrants in the market all the time like the Sydney Morning Herald and Woolworth launching their own insurance brands, but who buys their insurance through a newspaper or a grocery store?
You see press releases come out about new players but they don’t any quantity or scale. We find the online market has pretty much had the same players for a number of years. Some people come and go but the top six have stayed the same over the last few years.
What are your other points of difference?
We don’t do cheap and nasty policies. A lot of Aussies buy off websites and that’s scaled on price and I think that it’s wrong when travellers buy on price alone.
Some of those cheap and nasty policies (lower tier) have fine print exclusions around moped, skiing, – because excluding those things keeps the premium way down. We as a company like to think we have integrity and our policy covers generally about 99 percent of about everything a person does on a holiday.
We like to think we’re a comprehensive policy at a very low price. We’re priced just above the cheap and nasties.
What other mistakes are Aussies making?
It’s very common for travellers to wait far too long to buy their travel insurance. It should be done as soon as you purchase a non-refundable flight.
A mistake that Aussies make in general is if they’re drunk out of your mind at 3.00am. If you normally do that in Australia then you should be even more cautious overseas not less cautious.
I don’t want to come across as a parent, it’s not my job to take away the fun but nothing good happens after midnight. The reason we say that is because the big claims we’ve declined never occurred at 3.00 in the afternoon, they’re always after midnight and there’s usually way too much alcohol or drugs involved.
People are putting themselves at grave financial risk and it’s heartbreaking but we’ve had young kids do crazy things so drunk they can’t even remember what happened.