Assistance contracts tend to get renewed on the number everyone can see: the price per case. It’s the one line that’s easy to compare, and it’s rarely where the real cost of the arrangement sits.
If you’re reviewing your assistance coordination for 2027 – whether that means testing the market or just checking that what you have still works – these are the four questions we’d put on the table first. Three of them are about what your own people still do after the case leaves the building. We’ve added what to look for in each, and what a thin answer usually means.
1. What still lands on your own desk after you hand a case over?
The visible half of a case is the part everyone plans for: getting someone to the right doctor, getting a car off the motorway and the family on their way again. That half is what you’re quoted for.
The other half is paperwork. Documentation that has to match the file. Invoices arriving in several languages over several weeks. A provider charging for something that was never agreed. A case that has to close cleanly, because one that doesn’t tends to come back to you.
If that work still sits with your team, you’re paying for the case twice – once on the invoice, once in your own hours. Anyone who measures assistance quality seriously grades administration separately from operations, for exactly that reason. It isn’t a detail at the back of the process. It’s half of it.
What to look for: ask the people who do it, not the people who manage it. Count the hours your team spends on documentation, cost follow-up and invoice reconciliation after a case has already been handed over. Then ask what your agreement actually says about who does that work. A thin answer here – “the team absorbs it” – usually means the cost is real. It just sits inside salaries you budgeted for something else.
2. What happens when a case is both medical and roadside?
If medical and roadside sit with different suppliers, your process probably assumes a case will be one or the other. Splitting them looks efficient on paper. It stops looking efficient the first time a case is both – an illness that leaves a car stranded, a breakdown that turns into a hospital visit.
What to look for: follow one real case of that kind through your own process. How many suppliers did it involve, how many case files did it open, how many invoicing flows did it create – and who explained the gaps to the customer? Every handover between suppliers is a point where something can be dropped, and the party holding the customer relationship is the one who has to answer for it.
3. Where does local presence end and a partner chain begin?
Coverage on a map is easy. A network that answers is harder. Most providers are genuinely strong in some markets and are working through someone else’s network in the rest – which is entirely normal, and worth knowing precisely.
What to look for: ask your provider to name the markets where they coordinate directly and the ones they reach through partners. Then look at where your own travellers actually go. A provider whose direct presence matches your volume is worth more than one with a longer list of countries, and a supplier who won’t give you that breakdown is telling you something.
4. How is their quality measured, and by whom?
Anyone can describe themselves well, and most do. The question is whether anyone outside the company has put a number on it.
What to look for: ask for an assessment someone else produced – a client scorecard, a network rating, an audit, a certification with a scope you can read. Ask what period it covers and whether it covers every case or a selection.
For the first half of 2026, a major European assistance client rated us A for operations and A for administration, with a 99% confidence rating. Two grades, because they are two different things. It covers every case we handled for them over those six months, medical and roadside, and it comes out of their records, not ours. It’s the kind of answer worth asking for, whoever you end up choosing.
What to do with the four answers
Put them next to the price per case and compare like with like: the administration that stays with you, the cases that cross between services, the markets where your provider is actually present, and the proof that isn’t self-written. If the arithmetic changes, it usually changes here rather than in the price.
September and October are when the year ahead gets decided. There’s still time to do it properly before January.
We’re happy to walk through the questions against your own case flow: what would move, what would stay with you, and what it would look like in practice.
See how we coordinate medical assistance and roadside assistance across Europe – or get in touch if you’d like to talk about the coordination behind your own cases.
