In the aftermath of the tsunami disaster, an increasing number of people are taking out travel insurance for overseas trips.

“According to our company’s statistics, only 10 percent of tourists were willing to buy emergency insurance before the tsunami disaster,” said Li Dangsheng, manager of marketing department of Shenzhen Comfort Travel Service (CTS).

“However, over the past week, the total number of outbound tourists who have purchased the insurance has increased to more than 10 percent,” Li said.

According to State policy, all travel agencies involved in overseas travel must purchase travel agency reliability insurance to guarantee tourists’ safety and compensation for any losses.

“In fact, the travel agency reliability insurance applies only when tourist’s personal injury and loss of belonging are caused by the travel agency, otherwise, the insurance company will refuse to make any compensation,” said Wang Yun, marketing manager of the Shenzhen International Travel Service Co. Ltd.

“Even though emergency insurance is purchased voluntarily by tourists, we’ve strongly recommended outbound tourists to buy the insurance when they decide to join an outbound trip with our company,” said Wang.

As well as cooperating with insurance giants such as the Pacific Life Insurance Company, the People’s Insurance Company of China Group, and Pang An Insurance (Group) Company of China, CTS has signed an agreement with the AIU Insurance Company of the United States to provide various types of insurance for outbound tourists.

“The tsunami, which hit the countries around the Indian Ocean last month, has given us a warning about the consequences of unexpected disasters, so we’ve been encouraging outbound tourists to buy emergency insurance since the beginning of this year,” said Li.

Based on the agreement with AIU Insurance, a tourist can buy a policy for a premium of 10 yuan (US$1.2), which will provide a 100,000-yuan cover for physical injury. The number of policies that can be bought by an individual is limited to five. Before the Indian Ocean tsunami tragedy, China had no rule limiting the number of policies outbound tourists could buy.

According to some Chinese media, in Guangdong Province, the total number of outbound tourists buying emergency insurance has gone up drastically.

Statistics show that only about 20 percent of outbound tourists bought emergency insurance before the tsunami, but about 40 percent were now doing so.

(Shenzhen Daily January 12, 2005)