If a guest injures themselves on a partner’s property, or damage occurs to a neighbour’s property, a third-party lawsuit or liability incident might be significantly, financially very damaging.
As part of our team’s worldwide study to better understand partners’ experience and challenges in regards to hosting, we identified an opportunity to better protect them. So we created the Partner Liability Insurance programme to protect against liability claims up to €1,000,000 for every reservation.
Insurance is a highly regulated and complex area. I had to learn a few abbreviations and legal definitions first: TPA (Third Party Administrator), FNOL (First Notice of Loss), preFNOL (pre First Notice of Loss), underwriter, policy, coverage, claim, etc.
Since Booking.com is not the insurer, the company partnered with Zurich for the underwritten coverage and with theTPA, Crawford, to manage and process claims. With these parties in place, we could then begin to design an experience to help partners make a claim, and in this case, a preFNOL, right from the host’s admin area of Booking.com.
A simplified userflow of partners starting a liability claim process
We also designed an experience from the marketing landing page where partners can make a claim too. We had to cater for two slightly different sets; partners that have one property and partners that have multiple properties.
A prototype flow on Figma of the make a claim process
We tested our approach on the respective sets and after some initial refining and further testing, we launched the programme.
A screenshot of the admin area where a partner makes a liability claim
Whilst liability incidents are rarer than everyday content damage, the financial risk is greater. The programme has successfully covered partners’ unfortunate incidents.
During this project I learned to:
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