ING Bank Romania has launched ING Travel Protect, a new international travel insurance product developed in partnership with Allianz-Tiriac, one of Romania’s leading insurance providers. The product is available directly through ING’s Home’Bank digital platform, allowing customers to customize and purchase coverage in minutes, with options tailored for leisure, study, or business travel. Coverage includes medical expenses abroad, emergency assistance, lost documents, damaged or stolen luggage, sports injuries, and third-party liability. A 10% group discount applies automatically for parties of two to ten people, and a special launch promotion — available until June 30 — offers a full premium refund for every third person in a group. The product arrives against a backdrop of sobering industry data: according to UNSAR, an average of 50 insured tourists received compensation daily in the first half of 2025, the largest single claim reached €50,000 for accident-related medical treatment, and the ten largest claims combined exceeded €400,000. Allianz-Tiriac alone covered costs exceeding 21 million lei in 2025 for travel-related claims, including a €30,000 stroke in Greece, an €18,400 skiing accident in Italy, and a €20,000 traffic accident requiring surgery and repatriation. Over 80% of medical cases were settled through direct reimbursement, sparing policyholders from out-of-pocket payment at point of care.
Key Overview
- Product: ING Travel Protect — international travel insurance launched by ING Bank Romania in partnership with Allianz-Tiriac
- Distribution: Available directly through ING’s Home’Bank digital platform, customisable in minutes
- Coverage: Medical expenses abroad, emergency assistance, lost documents, damaged or stolen luggage, sports injuries, and third-party liability
- Trip Types Covered: Leisure, study, and business travel
- Group Discount: Automatic 10% discount for groups of 2–10 people — ideal for families, couples, and friends
- Launch Promotion: Until June 30, every third person in a group receives a full premium refund directly to their account
- Industry Context: UNSAR data shows 50 insured tourists received compensation daily in H1 2025; the largest single claim reached €50,000
- Allianz-Tiriac 2025 Claims: Over 21 million lei paid, including a €30,000 stroke in Greece, €18,400 skiing accident in Italy, and €20,000 traffic accident requiring surgery and repatriation
- Claims Settlement: Over 80% of medical cases settled through direct reimbursement — no out-of-pocket payment at point of care
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When the Trip Goes Wrong
There is a particular kind of financial shock that no traveller anticipates — and that many are completely unprepared for when it arrives. A fall on a ski slope in the Italian Alps. A stroke in a hotel room in Athens. A traffic accident on a foreign road that requires surgery, intensive care, and eventually medical repatriation back home. These events are statistically rare for any individual traveller, but they are far from uncommon in aggregate — and when they occur, they produce medical bills that can reach tens of thousands of euros in a matter of days.
The data from Romania’s insurance market makes the scale of this risk concrete. According to UNSAR — the Association of Romanian Insurers — an average of 50 insured tourists received compensation under travel insurance policies every single day during the first half of 2025. The largest single claim reached €50,000 for the medical treatment of a tourist who suffered an accident abroad. The ten largest claims combined exceeded €400,000, averaging more than €40,000 each. And these figures represent only the insured — the tourists who had the foresight to purchase travel cover before departing. The uninsured tourists who faced similar events bore those costs themselves.
It is against this backdrop that ING Bank Romania has launched ING Travel Protect — a new international travel insurance product developed in partnership with Allianz-Tiriac, Romania’s leading insurance company. The product is designed to bring travel insurance into the digital age: customisable, instantly accessible through ING’s Home’Bank platform, and priced with a group discount structure that makes it particularly attractive for the families, couples, and friend groups who form the backbone of Romanian international travel.
Historical Context: Romania’s Travel Insurance Market and Its Evolution
Romania’s relationship with travel insurance has evolved significantly over the past two decades, shaped by the country’s economic development, its integration into the European Union, and the dramatic growth in international travel that has accompanied rising living standards and the expansion of low-cost air connectivity.
In the early post-communist period, international travel by Romanian citizens was limited by both financial constraints and the restricted availability of foreign currency and travel documents. Insurance products were a luxury that the small proportion of the population who did travel abroad — primarily business travellers and the affluent — purchased primarily through state or state-adjacent insurance institutions. The concept of travel insurance as a routine element of trip preparation, analogous to booking a hotel or purchasing a flight, was not established in Romanian consumer culture.
EU accession in 2007 transformed this landscape. The right of Romanian citizens to live, work, and travel freely throughout the European Union opened a new era of mobility — for work, study, tourism, and family visits — that created a mass market for travel-related financial products, including insurance. Romanian citizens became some of the most mobile in Europe: a significant diaspora established itself across Western Europe, particularly in Italy, Spain, Germany, and the United Kingdom, while domestic tourism outflows grew rapidly as a growing middle class sought European travel experiences.
The growth in travel was accompanied by a gradual increase in travel insurance awareness and adoption, but penetration remained lower than in Western European markets. Cultural attitudes that historically underestimated the probability of travel emergencies, limited financial literacy around insurance products, and the friction of purchasing insurance through traditional channels — which often required visits to bank branches or insurance offices — all suppressed adoption below what the actual risk exposure of Romanian travellers would justify.
The COVID-19 pandemic — which effectively suspended international travel for much of 2020 and 2021 — paradoxically contributed to a shift in insurance awareness. The experience of having travel plans disrupted, of confronting the financial consequences of cancelled trips and unexpected medical situations, and of observing the difficulties faced by travellers stranded abroad without adequate coverage created a generation of Romanian travellers who are meaningfully more aware of travel risk than their predecessors. The post-pandemic recovery in international travel has therefore been accompanied by somewhat higher insurance penetration — a trend that products like ING Travel Protect are designed to accelerate.
The partnership between ING Bank Romania and Allianz-Tiriac brings together two institutions with complementary strengths in this market. ING Bank Romania, part of the global ING Group, has built a strong digital banking franchise in Romania with a customer base that is disproportionately composed of digitally engaged, internationally mobile professionals — precisely the demographic most likely to travel abroad and most receptive to digital insurance purchasing. Allianz-Tiriac, as one of the country’s leading general insurance providers, brings underwriting capability, claims management infrastructure, and the brand recognition that provides customers with confidence in the financial substance behind the coverage.
The Product in Detail: What ING Travel Protect Actually Covers
The coverage architecture of ING Travel Protect reflects a comprehensive approach to the risk landscape of international travel — addressing the medical emergencies that represent the highest-severity claims while also covering the more frequent but lower-severity events that can significantly disrupt the traveller experience.
Medical Expenses Abroad
Medical coverage is the foundational element of any serious travel insurance product, and for good reason — it is the category in which claims can escalate to life-changing financial severity most rapidly. The Allianz-Tiriac claims data from 2025 illustrates the range vividly: a stroke in Greece requiring €30,000 in treatment costs; a skiing accident in Italy generating an €18,400 claim; a traffic accident abroad that required surgery, hospitalisation, and medical repatriation at a total cost of €20,000. These are not exotic edge cases — they are the kinds of events that occur regularly in the normal course of international travel and that, without insurance, would represent catastrophic financial shocks for the vast majority of Romanian families.
The provision that over 80% of medical cases were settled through direct reimbursement — meaning that policyholders received care without having to pay upfront and subsequently seek reimbursement — is particularly significant. The experience of needing emergency medical care in a foreign country, often in a language the patient does not speak, is already severely distressing. Adding the burden of making large out-of-pocket payments to an unfamiliar foreign hospital, while ill or injured, and then navigating a reimbursement process from abroad, substantially worsens the experience and can create barriers to accessing appropriate care. Direct reimbursement, backed by 24/7 assistance and coordination with medical providers, addresses this problem at its root.
Emergency Assistance
Emergency assistance coverage extends beyond the medical dimension to encompass the broader support infrastructure that travellers need when things go seriously wrong — evacuation to appropriate medical facilities, repatriation to Romania when medically necessary, emergency accommodation, and communication support. This coverage is particularly valuable for travellers visiting destinations where the local healthcare infrastructure may not be adequate for serious medical conditions, or where language barriers create significant coordination challenges.
Lost Documents, Luggage, and Personal Property
While the financial consequences of lost documents or stolen luggage are far less severe than those of a medical emergency, they are far more common and can still create significant disruption to travel plans. Lost or stolen passports require interaction with consular services, temporary travel documents, and often changes to return travel arrangements. Stolen or damaged luggage creates immediate practical problems as well as financial loss. Coverage for these events — typically provided as fixed or capped benefit amounts — transforms what might otherwise be a travel-wrecking incident into a manageable inconvenience.
Sports Injuries
The inclusion of sports injury coverage reflects the reality of how contemporary Romanian travellers use their international trips. Skiing in the Alps, hiking in the Carpathians’ international extensions, water sports in the Mediterranean — active travel is a growing segment of the leisure market, and the injury risks associated with these activities are meaningfully higher than those of purely passive tourism. The Allianz-Tiriac €18,400 skiing claim in Italy is a precise illustration of the exposure that skiers face and that standard travel policies without explicit sports coverage might not fully address.
Third-Party Liability
Coverage for harm caused to others — known as third-party liability or personal liability coverage — protects the traveller against the financial consequences of accidentally injuring another person or damaging another person’s property while abroad. In jurisdictions with sophisticated tort systems and high damages awards — which includes much of Western Europe and the United States — the potential liability exposure from even a minor accident can be significant, and this coverage provides essential protection for an exposure that many travellers do not consciously anticipate.
The Digital Distribution Advantage: Insurance at the Speed of Trip Planning
One of the most strategically significant aspects of ING Travel Protect is its distribution through ING’s Home’Bank digital platform, which allows customers to customize and purchase coverage in minutes, directly from their banking environment, without branch visits or paper processes.
This distribution model addresses one of the most persistent barriers to travel insurance adoption: friction in the purchase process. Traditional travel insurance purchasing — which often involved visiting an insurance office or a bank branch, completing paper forms, and waiting for policy documents to be issued — was sufficiently inconvenient that many travellers simply did not bother, particularly for shorter trips or trips that were planned at short notice. The digital model eliminates this friction entirely, making the purchase of travel insurance as straightforward as the online booking of the flight or hotel it is intended to protect.
The integration of the insurance purchase into the banking platform is particularly powerful because it meets customers in a financial environment they already trust and regularly use, at a moment when they are likely to be thinking about travel-related financial matters — booking flights, exchanging currency, or checking account balances before departure. This contextual relevance makes the insurance offering more salient and more likely to be acted upon than a standalone insurance product marketed through separate channels.
Roxana Cristea, Head of Lending and Insurances Retail Banking at ING Bank Romania, articulated the design philosophy clearly: “We set out to make purchasing travel insurance a clear and quick process, tailored to the pace at which people plan their trips today.” This framing — insurance at the speed of modern trip planning — captures something important about the shift in consumer behaviour that digital distribution enables. In an era when flights are booked on mobile apps, hotels on aggregator platforms, and experiences through social media recommendations, the expectation is that every element of the travel planning process is as immediate and frictionless as the others. Insurance has historically been the exception; ING Travel Protect is designed to make it the rule.
The Group Discount: Making Insurance Accessible for How People Actually Travel
The automatic 10% group discount for parties of two to ten people — and the special launch promotion offering a full premium refund for every third person in a group until June 30 — reflects a sophisticated understanding of the social structure of Romanian travel. Families travelling together for summer holidays, couples exploring European cities, groups of friends on ski trips, and multi-generational family reunions in Mediterranean destinations are not marginal market segments — they are the dominant form of leisure travel for a large proportion of Romanian international travellers.
The standard insurance market has historically served these travellers inefficiently. Group travel policies have often required complex administrative processes, have not been readily available through digital channels, or have simply not offered the kind of pricing advantage that would make group purchasing obviously worthwhile relative to each traveller purchasing individually. ING Travel Protect’s automatic group discount — triggered by the number of travellers on the policy rather than requiring any special application process — removes the administrative barrier entirely and makes the group pricing benefit immediately visible and accessible.
The launch promotion’s premium refund for every third group member is a particularly acute financial incentive for the specific travel configurations that are most common — a family of three, a group of six friends, or a corporate team of nine. By making the third traveller’s insurance effectively free, the promotion substantially reduces the per-person cost for these common group sizes, creating a compelling case for group policy purchase that is both financially rational and easy to communicate.
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Why Claims Data Matters: The Real Cost of Travelling Uninsured
The claims data published by UNSAR and Allianz-Tiriac serves a function that extends beyond statistical reporting — it provides the empirical foundation for understanding why travel insurance is not an optional extra but a genuine financial necessity for international travellers.
Consider the implications of the UNSAR data. An average of 50 insured tourists receiving compensation daily in the first half of 2025 means that, across a six-month period, approximately 9,000 Romanian travellers made travel insurance claims. These 9,000 claims represented a fraction of the total Romanian tourists who experienced difficulties abroad — the uninsured remainder bore their costs without compensation. The largest single claim of €50,000 would have been financially catastrophic for virtually any Romanian household without insurance cover. The average of the ten largest claims — over €40,000 — similarly exceeds the annual income of a significant proportion of Romanian workers.
Allianz-Tiriac’s 2025 figures add further texture. More than 21 million lei in claims paid — representing a meaningful portfolio of real events experienced by real Romanian travellers. The specific case examples — a stroke in Greece, a skiing accident in Italy, a traffic accident requiring surgery and repatriation — are not selected for their unusualness but for their typicality: these are the categories of event that travel insurance is designed to address, and they occur with a regularity that makes the absence of coverage a genuinely significant financial risk for any international traveller.
Risks to Consider
ING Travel Protect is a well-structured product from established partners, but prospective purchasers should understand the dimensions of any travel insurance product that require attention.
Coverage exclusions are an inherent feature of all insurance products, and travel insurance is no exception. Pre-existing medical conditions, high-risk activities not explicitly covered by the sports injury clause, travel to destinations subject to government travel advisories, and events arising from alcohol or drug impairment are common exclusions that travellers should review carefully before purchasing. Understanding what is not covered is as important as understanding what is.
Claim documentation requirements can create friction in the settlement process. While the 80% direct reimbursement rate for medical claims is impressive, claims for lost luggage, stolen documents, and similar events typically require documentation — police reports, receipts, medical records — that travellers may not always have or may find difficult to obtain in a foreign environment. Travellers should understand the documentation requirements for different claim types before departure.
Coverage adequacy for extended or complex trips requires careful assessment. The standard coverage limits that are appropriate for a short leisure trip to a European destination may not be sufficient for longer trips, higher-risk destinations, or travellers with specific medical needs. The customisation capability of ING Travel Protect is valuable in this context — it allows travellers to tailor their coverage to their specific risk profile — but realising that benefit requires some engagement with the coverage options rather than simply accepting a default package.
Challenges Ahead
Several dynamics will shape the development of Romania’s travel insurance market and the competitive position of products like ING Travel Protect in the coming years.
Insurance literacy among Romanian consumers, while improving, remains an area for development. A proportion of Romanian travellers continue to underestimate the probability and financial severity of travel emergencies, or to assume — incorrectly — that their European Health Insurance Card provides comprehensive coverage abroad. (The EHIC covers only state-provided emergency healthcare in EU countries, not private medical care, medical repatriation, or any of the non-medical coverages that comprehensive travel insurance provides.) Closing this knowledge gap is essential for realising the market potential that the UNSAR claims data suggests is significant.
The competitive landscape in Romanian travel insurance is intensifying as digital banking and insurance platforms multiply. ING’s advantage — the combination of a trusted banking relationship, a seamless digital purchase experience, and Allianz-Tiriac’s underwriting strength — is meaningful but not permanent. Maintaining the product’s relevance and competitiveness will require continuous investment in the digital experience, the coverage architecture, and the claims service quality that ultimately determines whether policyholders renew and recommend.
Seasonal concentration of travel demand — heavily skewed towards summer months and the December-January holiday period — creates claims management capacity challenges that require planning and investment to address. The ability to provide 24/7 assistance and direct reimbursement at scale during peak periods, when claim volumes are highest and medical facilities in popular destinations are under the greatest pressure, is a critical operational test for any travel insurer.
Looking Ahead: Travel Insurance in Romania’s Digital Banking Future
ING Travel Protect represents more than a new product line — it is an expression of a broader vision for what digital banking can deliver to Romanian consumers. The integration of insurance into the banking relationship, the elimination of purchase friction through seamless digital distribution, and the design of coverage around how people actually travel — in groups, across multiple trip types, at the pace of modern life — all point towards a future in which the artificial separation between banking and insurance services becomes increasingly irrelevant to the consumer.
For Romanian travellers, the practical implications are immediate and significant. In a context where the cost of medical services abroad continues to rise, where a single emergency can produce bills that represent years of savings, and where the complexity of navigating a foreign healthcare system without support can be overwhelming, the availability of comprehensive, instantly accessible, digitally managed travel insurance is a genuine improvement in financial wellbeing.
The UNSAR data — 50 claims per day, €50,000 maximum individual claim, €400,000 combined for the ten largest claims — makes the case for travel insurance not as a theoretical financial planning exercise but as a practical response to documented real-world risk. The Allianz-Tiriac claims experience — strokes, skiing accidents, traffic emergencies, surgeries and repatriations — puts human faces on that statistical reality.
ING Travel Protect does not eliminate travel risk. No insurance product does. What it does is ensure that when the trip goes wrong — as it does, for 50 Romanian tourists every day — the financial consequences are manageable, the support is immediate, and the traveller can focus on recovery rather than on the arithmetic of foreign medical bills.
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