New offers from Swiss
As before, the travel insurance packages issued by the insurer AIG apply to the Swiss airline. They include travel cancellation and interruption insurance. Now additional services have been added that can be booked by the insured. The insurer's offers apply to all passengers who fly with Swiss or who travel with Australian Airlines or with Lufthansa as the parent company.
The option for travel insurance is called? Travel Care? and is aimed at passengers who can fly but then have to be in quarantine because they have been found to be infected with the corona virus. The insurance then not only covers the medical costs for the treatment of the disease, but also bears the costs for any return transport of the passenger to Switzerland.
The travel insurance option can be booked by all passengers who are resident in Switzerland, Austria or Germany. The advantage for Swiss customers is that the insurance gives them greater planning security. Together with Lufthansa, Swiss tries to take away the guests' fear of traveling.
Travel flexibly without additional costs
The airline is offering passengers more flexibility with the new travel insurance policy, especially as there are no rebooking fees. To this end, all tariffs and the entire tariff structure will be converted by the end of 2020. Since the end of August, all tariffs with Swiss can be rebooked without additional fees, although this is also possible several times. A one-time rebooking was even possible in spring directly after the outbreak of the corona pandemic, but this could not be done multiple times.
Swiss in crisis
The background to the frequent considerations about how passengers can be accommodated is that Swiss has plunged into a serious crisis. Only a few customers have booked trips in 2020, after all, travel to almost all parts of the world had to be stopped or was and is associated with great difficulties. Sometimes only five percent of all aircraft were still on the move, the rest of the fleet had to stay on the ground.
The costs for the aircraft continued, however, the airline's operating loss is now around CHF 414.7 million. Only within the first nine months of the year! Since another quarter will follow, significantly higher losses must be expected, because an end to the current situation is currently not in sight.
In the summer months, Swiss tried to rebuild some of its offerings, and in some cases it succeeded better than expected. But since the middle of August, the travel restrictions have increased again and made any progress made by the airline and all other companies and tourism companies disappear again. In the meantime, Swiss has announced that there will be an austerity program. Among other things, the following measures are planned:
- early retirement of employees
- Hiring freeze
- Part-time models
- partial wage waiver by employees
In the next two years, Swiss would like to cut up to 1,000 jobs, although no layoffs have been discussed so far. However, the above-mentioned measures should nevertheless allow a gradual reduction in staff.
The airline's success will depend on how the health situation in Switzerland and around the world develops and how politicians react to this and what measures are taken to restrict corporate activities.
Conclusion: Swiss offers a new component in travel insurance
The airline Swiss offers an additional Covid service through its in-house insurer AIG. This involves financial support for passengers who have to be quarantined at their destination due to an infection with the virus. In addition, the return trip of the person concerned is financially secured through the insurance. Furthermore, multiple rebookings are currently possible, so that travelers do not have to accept any financial losses if they cannot fly.
