As holidays become more digitally connected yet commercially fragmented, a new Skift-Allianz Partners report warns that the real test of travel loyalty begins when something goes wrong.
The modern traveller can build an overseas holiday in less time than it once took to unfold a paper map. A flight here, a hotel there, perhaps a cruise, rail connection, airport transfer, restaurant booking and insurance policy added along the way. On a good day, the machinery hums so quietly that the journey feels beautifully joined up.
Then one flight is cancelled.
Suddenly, that sleek digital trip can resemble a committee meeting in which nobody has brought the minutes.
That is the central warning in the new report, When the Journey Breaks: Closing the Accountability Gap Across a Fragmented Travel Experience, produced by Skift in partnership with Allianz Partners. Its argument is simple, commercially uncomfortable and increasingly relevant: travel is sold in pieces, but travellers experience it as one journey.
When disruption hits, they rarely care which supplier’s terms and conditions technically own the problem. They want somebody to take responsibility and help put the trip back together.
The report calls this travel’s “accountability gap” the distance between the company technically responsible for the disruption and the brand the traveller expects to help resolve it. When the Journey Breaks – Closi…
That gap matters because disruption is no longer merely an operational nuisance.
It is becoming a loyalty event.
A connected trip until it isn’t
The report maps the modern journey across airlines, hotels, booking platforms, card issuers, transport operators, experience companies and insurers.
Its cited research shows 58% of travellers surveyed planned to use an online travel agency for their next trip, 50% expected to book directly with a hotel or airline, 25% planned to use a professional agent and 16% a packaged tour. Multiple responses were permitted, and therein lies the point. Many travellers move between suppliers and channels rather than living happily inside one tidy booking ecosystem. When the Journey Breaks – Closi…
To the industry, these are separate transactions.
To the traveller, they are Tuesday.
The weakness becomes obvious only when one component fails. A delayed flight can become a missed connection, a forfeited hotel night, a cancelled excursion or an event disappearing over the horizon. The report says 59% of surveyed travellers are concerned about delays and cancellations, while rising costs, extreme weather and medical emergencies also feature prominently among travel concerns. When the Journey Breaks – Closi…
Heather McIntyre, Global Head of Travel Operations at Allianz Partners, captures the human reality rather neatly:
“The traveler sees one connected journey. When a flight is canceled, it can mean missing the hotel and the event a family has been planning for months. Each part of the experience depends on the others.”
When the Journey Breaks – Closi…
There lies the commercial problem. A traveller may have six suppliers, but emotionally there is often only one brand in the firing line: the airline they chose, the hotel group whose loyalty status they earned, the booking platform they trusted, the travel adviser who arranged the holiday or the insurer they believed would be there when the wheels came off.
Points are pleasant. Rescue is memorable.
Travel has spent years teaching customers to value points, tiers, lounge access, upgrades and member-only rates.
None of those benefits is trivial. Loyalty programs remain powerful tools for encouraging customers to return.
But the Skift–Allianz Partners report argues that traditional loyalty benefits do not necessarily create permanent commitment. It cites a Global Loyalty Stickiness Index score of 63 out of 100, which the report describes as “moderate”: loyalty influences decisions, but does not stop travellers from switching when price, convenience or experience tips the scales. When the Journey Breaks – Closi…
Disruption changes that equation.
Points, status and recognition may help win the booking. According to the report, what encourages customers to return after something goes wrong is much more fundamental: clarity, control, protection and human help. When the Journey Breaks – Closi…
Anna Kofoed, Chief Officer, Global Strategic Partnerships at Allianz Partners, expresses the difference succinctly:
“Rewards create satisfaction. But support during disruption creates trust. And trust is what makes loyalty durable the kind that survives a bad day.”
When the Journey Breaks – Closi…
That distinction should command the attention of airlines, hotels, cruise lines, tour operators, OTAs and travel agencies.
A refund may close a case inside a computer while leaving the customer furious. A voucher can satisfy company policy without recovering the journey.
The report therefore proposes a broader measure of success built around three outcomes: resolution, recovery and relationship. Was the technical issue processed? Could the traveller continue or restore the journey? And did the experience preserve trust? When the Journey Breaks – Closi…
The spreadsheet may say “closed”.
The customer may be telling half the family never to use the company again.
Automation needs a handbrake
Another major theme runs through the report: automation is valuable, but it should know its limits.
For straightforward travel-insurance claims, technology can speed up verification, approval, and payment. That makes perfectly good business sense. When the information is clear and the outcome predictable, forcing a customer through needless manual processing is not service; it is archaeology.
Yet every automated interaction still affects the relationship between customer and brand. The report argues companies need to balance the operational gains of speed, scale and lower friction against responsibility, reassurance and the customer’s perception of who actually helped. When the Journey Breaks – Closi…
This offers a useful warning for the industry’s current enthusiasm for replacing human service with digital containment.
The financial savings from automation can appear quickly. The damage to loyalty may take considerably longer.
More dead ends in complex cases, greater customer effort, weaker trust, lower repeat purchasing and quiet booking leakage may not announce themselves at the quarterly meeting with a flashing red light. Importantly, the report itself notes that this is a strategic-risk framework, not a quantified forecast of disruption-driven churn. When the Journey Breaks – Closi…
That qualification adds credibility. No invented percentage claims that every encounter with a hopeless chatbot sends a customer fleeing to the opposition.
Instead, the report recommends a practical boundary.
Automation becomes less appropriate when there is ambiguity, emotion, complexity or serious consequence. A routine delay notification is one matter. A frightened traveller stranded overseas with a medical emergency, conflicting policies and anxious relatives is quite another. When the Journey Breaks – Closi…
The report says 57% of global travellers surveyed are concerned that they or a companion may become ill and 56% are concerned about medical emergencies. It also reports that 63% expect access to 24/7 support and emergency assistance through an insurer app. When the Journey Breaks – Closi… When the Journey Breaks – Closi…
Its proposed division of labour is refreshingly sensible.
Machines monitor, detect, verify, notify, process and pay.
People interpret, reassure, coordinate, adapt, escalate and remain accountable. When the Journey Breaks – Closi…
That is not an anti-technology argument.
It is a grown-up technology argument.
Insurance moves from product to service
The report also makes a strong commercial case for connecting protection throughout the journey rather than treating travel insurance as a checkbox bolted onto the payment page.
Among travellers surveyed worldwide, 67% already had travel insurance or said they were likely to purchase it. Among respondents who had or were likely to buy cover, 85% valued peace of mind and security, 85% valued protection from unforeseen disruption and 84% valued cancellation reimbursement. When the Journey Breaks – Closi…
Protection, however, becomes considerably less impressive if the customer is bounced into an entirely separate servicing universe the instant something goes wrong.
The report argues that travel brands should retain customer context, brand attribution, experience control and relationship continuity. It also notes that 42% of travellers who typically purchase insurance do so when booking, while 35% of people who did not intend to purchase insurance said bundling it with the booking would make them more likely to do so. When the Journey Breaks – Closi…
In plain English: if a travel company introduces the customer to a protection partner, it should not appear to abandon them when that protection is needed.
Alaska Airlines turns a delay into proactive care
Perhaps the most tangible part of the report is its Alaska Airlines case study.
According to the report, Alaska Airlines became Allianz Partners’ first airline partner to launch parametric flight-delay insurance benefits incorporating proactive payments.
When an eligible delay occurs, connected flight information lets Allianz Partners identify the traveller and initiate an eligible payment under the travel-delay benefit, rather than requiring the customer to start a conventional claims process. Notifications can then be delivered by SMS and email. When the Journey Breaks – Closi…
Heather McIntyre explains the proposition:
“We receive an immediate notification when the trip has been interrupted, so we can automatically send a payment to cover that interruption.”
When the Journey Breaks – Closi…
The report says the program was introduced across Alaska’s domestic and international non-refundable segments and records a 4.42 out of 5 guest satisfaction score among travellers receiving the proactive benefits. When the Journey Breaks – Closi…
Alaska Airlines’ own website independently confirms its Allianz travel-insurance offering includes protection for eligible travel delays, trip cancellation or interruption, baggage problems and emergency assistance, together with 24/7 multilingual support. Individual benefits remain subject to the applicable policy terms, conditions and exclusions.
This is where the theory becomes genuinely interesting.
Instead of the traveller discovering a delay, finding an insurance policy, locating a claim form, assembling paperwork and beginning the chase, the system can recognise an eligible event and start the response.
Operationally, that is automation.
Emotionally, it says something far more powerful:
We noticed.
The accountability gap belongs in the boardroom
No airline, hotel, OTA, cruise company or insurer can control every component of a journey. Nor can any business eliminate weather events, transport failures, illness, or the many other surprises that can turn a holiday into an unscheduled exercise in character building.
The question is what happens after the disruption begins.
For travel businesses, this makes partner selection a customer-experience decision, not simply a procurement decision.
Drawing on its interviews and case study, the report identifies six capabilities leaders should assess when selecting protection and assistance partners: proactivity, breadth, human capability, integration, brand attribution and resilience. When the Journey Breaks – Closi…
That becomes especially important as travel grows increasingly automated and fragmented.
Artificial intelligence may make shopping, booking and routine servicing astonishingly efficient. But there is little comfort in encountering a beautifully integrated series of digital systems when each one politely explains that somebody else owns your problem.
The best model is not human versus machine.
It is human plus machine, with each doing the work it excels at.
An important qualification for Australian readers
One important caveat for an Australian publication.
The Allianz Partners Global Travel Confidence Index 2026, which supplies numerous statistics in the Skift–Allianz report, is global research rather than Australian-specific consumer research.
Allianz Partners says the underlying Ipsos survey covered 11,010 people across 10 markets: China, France, Germany, Great Britain, India, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland and the United States. Australia was not among the listed markets.
Accordingly, those percentages should not be described as findings specifically about Australian travellers.
The operational lesson, however, travels rather well.
Australians routinely assemble holidays using airlines, hotels, cruises, OTAs, travel advisers, transfer operators, rail companies, attractions and insurers. One disruption can ricochet across several bookings, contracts and customer-service departments before breakfast.
Contractual responsibility may be scattered across half the industry.
The traveller still experiences one broken holiday.
And when that happens, the company that answers the phone, sends the useful message, organises the next step or simply behaves as though somebody is in charge may earn more loyalty in one dreadful afternoon than months of polished advertising could ever purchase.
That is perhaps the strongest conclusion to emerge from When the Journey Breaks.
Travel brands cannot promise that journeys will never break.
They can decide what happens next.
And in an industry increasingly obsessed with frictionless booking, the greater competitive advantage may be something more valuable: frictionless recovery.
Download the complete report here.
By: Stephen Peters – © 2026.
Read Time: 10 minutes.
Author Bio:
Stephen Peters has spent much of his career proving that the straight-and-narrow path is considerably overrated. Armed with a Bachelor’s degree in Technology from the University of Queensland and a Master’s in Management, he first ventured into hospitality, working in and helping open several five-star hotels across Sydney and Asia.
After deciding he had experienced quite enough of five-star hospitality from the operational side of the desk, Stephen returned to technology, working with major US tech companies while based between Australia and Asia.
Then came the ultimate change of scenery. Stephen built his own yacht and, with his family aboard, sailed from Florida through the United States and its Great Lakes before crossing the Pacific to Asia. Several memorable years followed, exploring Indonesian waters before the Peters family eventually returned to Australia with considerably more sea miles, stories and perspective than when they left.
