Liu Minxia, Cao Ying

    mllmx@msn.com

    WHILE a Taiwan plane with 58 passengers and crew on board crashed into a Taipei river shortly after take-off yesterday, a Chinese insurer and China’s largest air rescue firm here in Shenzhen launched a travelers’ insurance product with the highest accident benefit in China to offer travelers more compensation in case of an accident.

    BOC Insurance, the first Chinese insurance firm under a bank, and Deer Jet Co., China’s largest air ambulance operator, said policyholders’ personal accident benefit could reach 25 million yuan (US$4.07 million) in the event of death or permanent total disablement while traveling on public conveyance, the highest among all insurance products in China.

    With increasing personal wealth, the number of Chinese traveling overseas has been on the rise, and more travelers are willing to spend money on insurance in the face of frequent natural and man-made accidents, Huang Yuanrong, general manager of BOC Insurance’s Guangdong branch, told reporters yesterday.

    Nearly 120 million Chinese traveled overseas last year, according to Deer Jet. It is expected that China will surpass Japan in 2017 to become the largest travel insurance market in Asia, Lu Haikuan, chairperson and CEO of Deer Jet, told reporters.

    “Our market research shows that Chinese travelers have a strong willingness to buy travel insurance, but each traveler spent less than 50 yuan on average on such protection annually,” Lu said. “It’s only about one-10th of the spending on travel insurance in developed countries. Even compared with the average spending of 200 yuan in Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, it is very low. I believe our market has the potential to grow by tenfold or even more.”

    Deer Jet said it has a 24-hour standby air ambulance fleet that could reach a global medical provider network in more than 200 countries and regions. Anyone aged between 1 and 75 is eligible to buy into the program, which costs up to 53,000 yuan a year, the firms said.