Travel Safe and Secure with Wallach & Company
by Leonard Shapiro
Everyone has a story about traveling abroad, that maniacal Parisian taxi driver going 80 down the Champs Elysee, that first, frightening London ride in the rental car with the steering wheel on the wrong side of the car, the mystery meat in a Hong Kong restaurant you later discovered was filet of feral cat.
Richard Wallach has his own treasure trove of hair-raising tales told by the travelers they deal with by the thousands every year. He and his wife, Ginger, own Wallach & Company, with offices in Middleburg’s Federal Court. The firm specializes in providing travel insurance for a wide variety of clients, local, national and international.
Take the long-ago case of an American biologist who travelled to do research into the deep jungles of Borneo, only to start having terrible stomach pains. Fortunately, he’d signed up with Wallach’s company for insurance, and before long, a helicopter was on its way, first dropping axes and chainsaws so a landing zone could be cleared, then transporting the poor fellow to a medical facility in Australia. Turned out he had appendicitis, and after a week, he was back doing whatever it is biologists do in Borneo.
The good news. His travel insurance covered it all.
Richard Wallach also recalled another client traveling in Eastern Europe who had a nasty car wreck that left him on the side of the road in critical condition. First responders got him to a nearby medical facility where he was stabilized, then transported to Switzerland by helicopter and eventually returned home to California in an air ambulance. The cost was close to $200,000, and once again, because he had the foresight to obtain the proper insurance, someone else paid the bill.
“We will insure medical, evacuation and, even repatriation of remains if that’s necessary,” Wallach said. “We do it for people of any nationality. We’ll only insure them once they’re out of their home country. It’s strictly short-term, international travel insurance. It can be as short as one day, all the way up to one year.”
The tourist/traveller represents only a small portion of their business. Wallach & Company does a lot of work with government agencies, particularly the State Department. They have a number of colleges and universities on their client list, insuring students on their way to those year-abroad study programs so popular these days. And of course, business travelers also are a key component.
With the peak tourist summer months approaching, Wallach was asked if there’s been any noticeable decline in travel for pleasure abroad, considering the recent terrorist attacks in Paris and Brussels, and turmoil in so many other parts of the world.
“I’m not really seeing that,” Wallach said. “Just as an example, after 9/11, we assumed that the study-abroad business would drop off. But it was just the opposite. Students were saying ‘we’re not afraid, we’re going to those countries.’ It actually picked up. I think the last 10-15 years, people have accepted that there is a degree of caution that needs to be recognized. But there has not been a major dropoff. Our drop-offs are pretty much predicated on how the stock market is doing. When capital gains go down, so does travel.”
Most of his company’s business these days is done via the internet, a major change from when Wallach first started out working for a Vienna, Virginia-based company, International Underwriters, in 1978. Ten years later he bought out his division of that company and in 1991 moved the business to Middleburg, where Ginger grew up, attending Hill School and Notre Dame (now Middleburg Academy).
Wallach comes from a military family that moved across the country and around the world on a fairly regular basis. He’s a VMI graduate, served in Vietnam and after being discharged, worked as a commercial pilot before getting into the travel insurance business. There are four people in the Middleburg office, including Ginger, and he estimates they provide insurance to about 15,000 clients per year.
“A lot of people buy this insurance for international assistance,” Wallach said. “A person is in a foreign country and has a problem—he’s lost his credit cards, he needs a lawyer, or medical assistance. We have an international assistance center in Baltimore. They get a toll free number from wherever they are in the world and when they call, they’ll immediately be in touch with a person who speaks the language of the country they’re in. They will get them to an English-speaking person who can help them, a doctor, a lawyer. You have a safety net that operates 24/7, 365 days a year to provide assistance for a person who is having significant issues and has no other place to turn.”
A biologist in a Borneo jungle can certainly attest to that.