If assistance coordination is on your list for 2027, the first thing you’ll want is a number: what it costs you today. The cost of assistance coordination is harder to pin down than it should be. It sits across several teams and a dozen budget lines, and nobody labels any of them assistance coordination.
If you coordinate assistance yourselves – in-house, or in the markets where you haven’t handed it over – these four questions are the ones we’d put on the table first. They’re the ones that tend to change the answer, and you can work through them with your own people in an afternoon. We’ve added what to look for in each, and what a thin answer usually means.
1. What does it cost you to be ready in the quiet months?
A steady flow of straightforward cases isn’t what makes an assistance operation expensive. You can staff for those, and they behave.
The cost sits in the capacity you keep ready for everything else. Someone has to answer at three in the morning on a public holiday, in a language the traveller actually speaks, when it’s the kind of case nobody wants. You pay for that readiness whether you use it or not, and you can’t scale it down when things go quiet.
What to look for: take your total coordination cost for a quiet month and divide it by the cases you actually handled. It’s rarely the number you’d guess. A thin answer here – “it’s covered by the team anyway” – usually means the cost is real. It just sits inside salaries you budgeted for something else.
2. How many hours disappear after a case is closed?
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.
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.
What to look for: ask the people who do it, not the people who manage it. Count the hours spent on documentation, cost follow-up and invoice reconciliation after a case is already closed. This is the half most comparisons leave out altogether, and it’s often the one that decides whether outsourcing would save you anything at all.
3. What do you spend keeping providers you hardly ever use?
Coverage on a map is easy. A network that answers is harder.
You have to find providers, check them and contract them. Then you have to use them often enough that the relationship still holds on the day you need something unusual. In the markets where you handle a case or two a year, that upkeep costs more per case than anyone budgets for. Nobody counts it, because it doesn’t look like a cost. It looks like someone’s time.
What to look for: list the countries where you handled fewer than ten cases last year, and ask what it took to be able to handle them at all. Then ask what happens when the provider you had a relationship with three years ago no longer answers.
4. 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 is a point where something can be dropped, and the party holding the customer relationship is the one who has to answer for it.
And one to ask whoever you’re comparing
Ask how their quality is measured, and by whom. Anyone can describe themselves well, and most do.
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. 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 choose.
What to do with the four answers
Put them next to what an external partner would quote you, and compare like with like – readiness, administration, network upkeep and the cases that cross between services. If the arithmetic changes, it usually changes here rather than in the price per case.
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.
