Global Airlines: Strategies in Travel Insurance and Co-Branded Payment Cards

Global Airlines: Strategies in Travel Insurance and Co-Branded Cards is a report and accompanying PartnerBASE™ dataset that provides a detailed overview of the involvement and partnerships of the world’s leading airline brands in three areas: stand-alone travel insurance; co-branded payment cards; and travel cover packaged with co-branded payment cards. In total, it covers 220 airline brands headquartered in 98 countries.

For each of stand-alone travel insurance, co-branded payment cards, and travel cover packaged with co-branded payment cards, the study analyses the providers of those products that have established the most partnerships with airlines, differentiating between card networks (e.g. American Express, MasterCard and Visa) and card issuers in the case of co-branded cards. In addition, by means of Finaccord’s system for weighting these relationships, it identifies the providers that hold the partnerships that are likely to deliver the greatest revenues by virtue of the fact that the airlines that they collaborate with are more substantial ones that serve a higher number of customers.

All analyses are provided both at a global and regional level with coverage of each of the following broad regions: the Asia-Pacific region and Australia; Europe, the Middle East and Africa; and North and Latin America.

This report and the PartnerBASE™ dataset that accompanies it can be used in one or more of the following ways:

•  to gain access to a comprehensive source of worldwide information outlining current initiatives and opportunities for marketing travel insurance and co-branded cards through all significant airline brands and groups – air travel is destined to carry on becoming increasingly popular in future years which means that airlines should be increasingly valuable partners for these services;

• to utilise the unweighted and weighted analysis of partnerships to understand which product providers have been successful in establishing relationships with leading airline brands and groups for each of the three types of service in scope plus the degree to which these partnerships exist across multiple countries;

• to identify airline brands that currently lack partnerships for travel insurance and co-branded cards – at the time of the research, over 80 of the airline brands investigated were not selling travel insurance via their online booking systems and over 100 had not yet launched a scheme for co-branded cards.

• travel insurance and assistance providers: globally, stand-alone travel insurance was worth close to USD 16 billion in gross written premiums in 2015 and Finaccord’s research indicates that airlines may hold a distribution share of upwards of 10% of this market – as such, they represent an important distribution channel for providers of travel cover;

• payment card issuers and networks: due in part to the vast membership of frequent flyer programs with which airline co-branded cards are usually linked, such co-branding programs are likely to be among the most profitable for payment card issuers and networks;

• airlines: successfully persuading passengers to take out ancillary products and services such as travel insurance and payment cards is key to the profitability of airlines given the often fierce competition in their core business of selling flights – this research will show them what their competitors are doing and who they are working for each of the three services in scope;

• management consultancies: if your company is assisting a travel insurer or card company with its airline partner strategy, or if it is helping an airline to define the correct approach to travel insurance and payment cards, then this research will provide it with a worldwide overview of current activity in these fields, saving time and effort on researching the subject itself.