Visitor Travel Insurance through a TPA – Travel Insurance Services
September 22, 2016
3 Ways Working with a TPA for Visitor Travel Insurance Can Grow Your Business Exponentially
Whether you’re a travel insurance broker, a tour operator, or a travel agent, you’ve all got one ultimate goal in mind, and that is satisfying your customers. It doesn’t matter whether you’re selling visitor travel insurance policies to your customers, or vacation packages. The bottom line is, you want your customer to feel confident that you are the expert at what you do, and that you pretty much have all the answers to their questions. Now, it’s kind of difficult to have all the answers. But at the very least, you want to show your customers that you’re skilled at your craft; whether it’s taking them on the vacation of a lifetime, or recommending an insurance policy. But regardless of what your occupation is, there’s one thing professionals in your fields can benefit from: working with a third-party administrator. In particular, a third-party administrator who is licensed to sell a variety of insurance. How so? Let’s go through 3 different ways working with a TPA can help you grow your business and make your customers happy.
Reduce Your Limitations
One of the biggest challenges we see that travel insurance brokers face is they are limited with regards to the types of policies and the variety of benefits they are able to provide to customers. Ultimately, you want to offer a competitive product to your customers, but what do you do if you don’t have the means or the eligibility to offer this to your customers? For example, if you work with only one insurance carrier through whom you sell policies, you may only be able to offer a couple plans to your customers, and none of those plans may match what your customers need.
But by working with a TPA, you’ll be able to gain access to numerous other insurance carriers, and thereby, more flexibility in the insurance plans you’re able to offer to your customers. One example of this can be seen internally in our organization, USI Affinity. One of our broker partners noticed that many of her customers were looking for student health insurance plans, something she wasn’t well-acquainted with. During a meeting with her, we suggested our StudyUSA Healthcare plan. Upon learning that our team can help her enroll high school students visiting the U.S., year over year sales increased nearly 150%.
Ease the Tension of Getting Licensed
Being licensed may not seem like a problem to insurance brokers, since brokers need to be licensed agents in order to sell insurance. However, that doesn’t guarantee they can sell everywhere. One thing that tends to stress out travel insurance brokers is working with customers from different states and countries. You want to be able to sell some of these very attractive insurance plans to your customers. However, you may not be licensed to sell in certain states.
Now with tour operators, or those of you running travel agencies, there’s no questions asked. It’s not required for you to be a licensed agent in order to put together tour packages and sell them to your customers. And you could always offer tour packages without offering travel insurance (although we’ve previously discussed why that may not be in your best interest.) But it is definitely required for you to get licensed in order to offer travel insurance directly to your customers.
In either case, you would need various licenses in order to properly sell policies in more areas without any complications. By working with a TPA, you can bypass the need to get licensed in different states and countries, and sell policies freely, especially if the TPA you’re working with is licensed in all 50 states.
Expand Your Knowledge Base
This one is self-explanatory, but as you work with a TPA more, you will start expanding your knowledge base in insurance as a whole. You can become a better broker or travel agent because as you consult with your TPA partner more frequently to learn about insurance solutions that best fit your customers’ needs, you’ll build more confidence as a professional and widen your knowledge base. You’ll be more quick-witted when it comes to giving your customers an answer regarding their insurance-related questions, which will in turn, increase your marketability.
Working with a TPA can be helpful to small companies in general. In our case, many of our brokers find our plans to be a great complement to the domestic health and life insurance plans they already offer. Additionally, our tour operators and travel agents have benefited from the flexible group insurance we tailor for them.
If this seems like a type of relationship you would like to explore or learn more about, please reach out to our customer service team by calling 1-800-937-1387, or by emailing us at [email protected].
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