Travix and Unigarant partner with Hepstar to boost personalised travel insurance
Press Release – June 7, 2018
Travix, one of the largest worldwide online travel agents has expanded their partnership with Hepstar, an insurtech startup focusing on the merchandising of travel insurance, to offer personalised travel insurance content to all customers across all their brands – BudgetAir.nl, Cheaptickets.nl and Vliegwinkel.nl – in the Netherlands.
The aim of the partnership is to move away from a one-size-fits-all travel insurance product to a more personalised offering. Identifying contextual and behavioural trends – such as buying behaviour and the user’s age – will enable Hepstar to understand what customers value in an insurance offering or not. The insights drawn from data analytics will further fine-tune the machine-learning algorithms used in Hepstar’s recommendation engine and drive product development.
Hepstar is an independent technology company that maximises travel merchant and insurer revenues from travel insurance sales through personalised product merchandising using its advanced e-merchandising technology. Hepstar partners with multiple global and local insurance companies across the world, allowing it to aggregate and merchandise travel insurance content for most travel merchant target markets.
The partnership was forged in 2017 to offer and optimise travel insurance content in Travix’s Asian markets through its BudgetAir website. After achieving positive results in this region, the decision was made to roll out Hepstar’s technology in the Netherlands, Travix’s main market; this venture has been done in collaboration with Travix’s local insurance provider, Unigarant.
Unigarant, a leading insurance provider in the Netherlands has created an innovative and uniquely flexible product portfolio to complement Hepstar’s intelligent recommendation engine and merchandising abilities. Being experts in their domain, Unigarant’s local market knowledge will be an invaluable contribution to the collaboration – expediting optimisation efforts.
“We will be the connectivity between these two giants,” said Brett Dyason, Co-founder of Hepstar. “Our technology will listen and learn in order to ensure product offers are relevant to customers, thereby changing product value perception and appeal to customers. The benefits to Travix will be an increase in insurance revenue per travel booking and a customer that feels he or she is being specially catered for.”
“Hepstar is empowering us to optimize conversion on travel insurance through personalisation and enabling us to offer the right insurance service to the right customer across the globe through a single integration. At Travix we believe that customer centricity will bring us to the next level and we are looking for innovative ways and valuable partners to ensure this”, said Paul van Breugel, CCO of Travix.
André Tuns, Sales Manager Travel of Unigarant is equally excited about the venture, adding: “Hepstar’s technology introduces new merchandising and distribution possibilities for Unigarant. It is important that we participate in this initiative and that we welcome collaborations with industry innovators such as Hepstar in order to meet the demands of an evolving online travel industry.”
“Working with such forward-thinking partners like Travix and Unigarant has been such a pleasure,” said Dyason. “It is clear that creating the best user experience for their customers is core to their values and strategy.”