Meon Emergency Assistance
One of Meon’s great selling points is that unlike many other TMCs, we deal in emergency medical assistance. If we can save your life, sorting your business meeting is a given.
Like corporate travel, medical assistance is about flights and hotels, but booked for different reasons. In a nutshell, one has a blue light and a siren, the other doesn’t. Repatriation demands precision, empathy and cost control; qualities that benefit business travellers. To use a medical comparison, if you’re a surgeon, you can also be a good GP.
Medical assistance is not disaster recovery – we only step in when a client is fit to move. We’re not plucking them off the beach after a tsunami, but we are bringing them back on flights not available to anyone else in the world.
Our medical assistance staff working from a high street in Petersfield are up there with some of the biggest competitors in the world in every country in the world. It’s alien to a business of our size; we work 24/7 with our own out-of-hours service, while others use a generic call centre. Others think it’s expensive and awkward, but we know the most important calls we receive are those in the middle of the night from someone needing our help – there’s always an emergency in the world somewhere every week.
It’s not just Brits; we deal with insurance companies on all four corners of the globe. That means our business is borderless in its relationships with airlines. The rule that you must have bricks and mortar in those countries to be licensed to buy fares in them doesn’t apply to us.
It’s only three in 1000 people who need repatriation but the urgent missions we undertake means excellent relations with airlines and the hotel industry nobody else has. If need be, we can get you home at the height of the summer season when no-one else can.
Repatriations sharpen logistical skills and cost efficiency decisions that we translate into optimised travel management. Repatriations also mean ‘No’ is not in our vocabulary. ‘We’ll get back to you’ isn’t either.
We answer the phone within five rings. We don’t do that because it’s good service, we do it because it could save someone’s life. Past global emergencies have proved we can step up from 300 calls in a weekend to 16,000 - and still answer them within five seconds.
It all means our professionals excel at complex itineraries, last-minute changes, duty of care obligations and protection of your most precious company asset, your people.
Our paymaster when we deal with emergencies is the insurance industry, which doesn’t like spending money, so we provide all the data that proves insurers couldn’t have saved a penny more – another principle that guides our corporate travel management.
Hopefully the only help you’ll need from us is booking your business trips, but rest assured, if something goes wrong, we’re the ones to talk to. The AA used to advertise itself as the fourth emergency service - perhaps that’s a claim we should adopt.
