OFFWEGO

SUMMARY: Risky behavior and outdated safety systems drive higher costs. Humans make mistakes and many organizations still lack the technology to effectively manage student travel health and safety. OffWeGo reduces these organizational risks through social connection and community, comparison of resources, and gamification. PROBLEM: It has become fashionable for institutions and organizations to throw around the term “duty of care” without a proper understanding of what it actually entails.... Current travel-tracking solutions are antiquated and ineffective in youth travel. Nearly 70% of students do not report their independent off-campus travel while on school-sponsored programs. The schools own the risk but are flying blind. When something goes wrong, the school is not only legally exposed to incident-related loss and expense, but disproportionate harm to reputation, and to strategic objectives to promote wide use of international study options. SOLUTION: OffWeGo is a mobile-first platform that transforms these needed student safety behaviors from “have to do it” to “want to do it," by applying social interaction, comparison, and proven gamification principles. We combine the “fun” social elements of travel with the more traditional risk management type of resources. OffWeGo matches students together, traveling to similar places at similar times while partnering with travel insurers and travel assistance firms to provide the necessary safety resources, such as geolocation, destination alerts, and on-call services/evacuation - depending on the subscription tier of the organization. In the back end, OffWeGo's proprietary algorithms work hard to help report key traveler data such as geolocation, user interactions, and risk analysis to the student's sponsoring institution and/or travel insurer to mitigate the organization's risk, increase more accurate policy/procedure creation, and reduce insurance premiums paid by the individual or organization respectively.More