In high season, a hotel or travel agency has no quiet hour to fix a cyber problem. If the booking system stops or a supplier payment goes to a fraudster, guests feel it the same day.
Cyber insurance for hospitality and travel businesses pays for the response, the lost bookings and the claims that follow. Here is how underwriters look at hotels, travel agencies and tour operators.
Why insurers look closely at travel and hospitality
Travel businesses hold rich personal data: names, addresses, passport details, travel dates and card numbers. Guests come from many countries, so one breach can mean notices in several languages.
The sector also runs on connected platforms. A hotel uses a property management system, a channel manager and online travel agents. A travel agency uses booking engines and global distribution systems. Each link is a dependency, and an outage in peak weeks costs far more than one in a quiet month.
Payments add more risk. For example, a travel agency with 70 staff pays hotels, transfer companies and guides abroad every week, often by email instruction. That is exactly the pattern payment fraudsters target.
Some proposal forms ask you to confirm that your main activity is outside a list of sectors. That list can include airlines and airport authorities, and an answer that puts you in it sends the application to an underwriter for referral. Hotels and agencies usually sit outside the list, but check your form.
The cyber risks underwriters see in travel and hospitality
- Supplier payment fraud. A fake email from a partner hotel announces new bank details just before a large group payment.
- Booking system outage. Ransomware hits the property management system on a full weekend, and reception checks guests in by hand.
- Card data exposure. Card details taken for reservations sit in emails or spreadsheets.
- Phishing through booking platforms. Staff get a fake guest message with a link that installs malware.
- Phone system hacking. Criminals use a hotel phone system to make expensive international calls overnight.
What underwriters usually ask travel and hospitality businesses
- Is MFA on for every user, including email, remote access, booking extranets and third parties? A console export or screenshots answer this.
- How do you verify new suppliers and bank detail changes? A call-back procedure using a known number, plus dual approval above a set amount, is strong evidence.
- Do you handle card data, and what is your PCI DSS status? Your self-assessment questionnaire or attestation answers it.
- How many personal records do you hold? A data inventory gives the number, including passport data.
- Do you remove leavers' access within one working day? A leaver checklist shows the process for seasonal staff.
- Is your phone system secured? Show that you changed default passwords and set controls on international dialling.
- Which hosted providers do you depend on? List booking engines, channel managers and hosting.
- Do you keep backups offline, with a restore test in the last six months? A dated test record is the evidence.
Cover that matters most for travel and hospitality
- Funds transfer fraud and new vendor fraud. Cover when money goes to a criminal posing as a supplier, or to a fake supplier you paid for the first time. Many policies set a lower sublimit here.
- Business interruption. Lost income after the waiting period. For example, a seaside hotel should agree an indemnity period long enough to cover its peak months.
- Dependent business interruption. Income lost when a booking platform you rely on fails. Some wordings need a written outage report from that provider.
- Privacy breach management. Notifying guests, identity monitoring, a call centre and translation.
- Telephone hacking. Cover for the unauthorised call charges.
- PCI fines and assessments. Many wordings cover these after a card breach, with chargebacks often excluded.
- Reputational harm. Some wordings pay for income lost when guests stay away after a public breach.
Many wordings exclude regional outages of the internet, telecoms or power. Your continuity plan is the answer to that gap.
How PrismX helps travel and hospitality businesses get insurance ready
- Discover maps your properties or offices, booking systems, guest data, suppliers and people.
- Assess checks each control and shows the insurer's view of your answers.
- Improve gives each gap an owner and a date, such as "remove seasonal staff logins, owner: HR, due end of October".
- Verify stores the evidence, gives each document an AI check and advisor verification, and tracks expiry: training counts for twelve months.
- Submission pack: PrismX builds a signed pack with a sha256 fingerprint.
- During an incident: in the pilot, PrismX follows your wording's notification clocks.
- Before you start: the supplier cyber risk checklist helps you prepare the supplier list.