Glenn Davis says he's grateful for his medical and security membership, which he bought as an afterthought three days before his recent trip to Italy.
Davis, a partner at an executive recruiting firm in Tampa, Fla., was visiting his daughter in Rome when he stepped off a train platform and fell onto a track, shattering his leg.
Two men rescued him seconds before a train arrived. An ambulance transported him to an Italian hospital, where he says no one spoke English.
"It was so frustrating," he says.
Fortunately, Davis' Medjet membership provides medical evacuation services. He called Medjet, which quickly arranged for an air ambulance to fly him directly back to a hospital in Tampa.
"They were lifesavers," he adds.
Membership programs like Covac Global, Medjet, Global Rescue and International SOS can supplement travel insurance by adding valuable services such as an emergency response hotline, translation and evacuation to your home hospital. (Travel insurance often will only transport you to the nearest hospital when you have an accident.) But in post-pandemic travel, medical and security memberships are adapting to meet new challenges, say observers — and in the near future, they'll be able to do more than get you to the nearest hospital.
Ross Caldwell Thompson, CEO of Covac Global, says medical and security memberships are on the verge of a tectonic shift. The legacy medical and security membership companies are busy upgrading their products with improved technology and integrations to add value in a new age of travel. However, our core mission of bringing our members home without complex requirements is paramount.
"The industry needs to look at its core offerings — the things that will bring their members home proactively," he says.
What kind of train is coming for subscribers, and indeed, for the industry itself? The last few months offer some clues.
In January, Covac launched a priority location and extraction benefit that for all of its members, which is unique in the industry, because it does not require Covac to know the member's whereabouts. "It could be a teen that doesn’t return from a nightclub in Spain or an executive that never came back from that business dinner in Mexico City," says Thompson. "Our location based global response resources have the capacity to initiate and investigative a search before any required policy wait times many police, rescue, and park rangers are bound."
One of the newest developments in medical and security membership is Global Rescue's GRID 2.0 system, introduced last month. The new system pushes event notifications and alerts to customers. They include alerts for civil unrest, disease-related developments, safety issues, transportation disruptions,
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The magic of hospitality is staying in a place that isn’t anything like home. A castle, a treehouse, a farm, a yurt: all such places promise an escape from the every day, especially when combined with luxury flourishes that boggle the mind. I am still wondering how ice showed up in the Gobi desert at the Three Camels Lodge in Mongolia or how blueberries came to be served at breakfast at the Explora Lodge on Easter Island. Or, in the case of the Four Seasons in Madrid, how a hotel combined seven historic properties into one sensational art destination.
The Hungarian gateway continues efforts to culminate an extensive network which now encompasses 122 cities and 130 airports, served by 39 airline partners.
Airport will operate 33 services to 11 countries across Europe, the UK & the USA this summer including a new daily service to New York-JFK with Delta from 24th May.
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For Hyatt loyalists, there are few things sweeter than the opportunity to earn extra night credits for stays. If you've been craving something sweet, we have some good news: World of Hyatt members can earn twice as many tier qualifying night credits from now through June 10 for eligible stays at Thompson and Dream hotels.
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