Insuring a Return From Life’s Last Stop

Charles Seven figures there are plenty of companies to fly you while you’re alive. He wants to bring you back if you die on a trip.

Horror stories abound concerning the costs and delays involved in arranging mortuary and air transportation services when someone dies in a foreign country, or even in another state.

So Seven and several other former corporate travel and insurance executives have formed a company and begun marketing a unique service called--take a deep breath--”Above and Beyond: the Premier One-Call Guaranteed Travelers Retrieval Plan.”

As is common with mortuaries and related businesses, Seven’s product name omits any mention of death and bodies. But that, indeed, is what Sevcor International Inc.’s Above and Beyond plan is all about.

For a one-time payment of $249--or $299 if you are 60 or older--the Newport Beach company guarantees to arrange everything necessary, from mortuary services and ground transport to embassy paperwork and air transport, to get your remains back home.

It will even fly a few family members out to help escort your body back--at no extra charge. And it wouldn’t matter, says Seven, whether you died in Albuquerque or Albania.

Sevcor does not sell directly to the public, but deals through wholesalers such as mortuaries, funeral insurance plans, travel agents and insurance brokers.

A spokesman for a major Southern California mortuary chain said it typically costs more than $750 to prepare and ship a body within the U.S. When a death occurs in a foreign country, the costs are considerably higher, he said.

Seven said the company has contracts with more than 200 charter companies and has access to more than 1,200 private aircraft in the U.S. and Canada.

The Above and Beyond plan is still untested. Sevcor was incorporated just eight months ago and started marketing its program only last month.

But interest in one test market has been high, according to Gregg Williamson, vice president of Palm Mortuaries & Cemeteries in Las Vegas.

Palm, with five mortuaries, three cemeteries and two crematories in Clark County, Nev., was one of the first to sign on.

Palm has its own prepaid funeral plan and late last month sent about 5,000 of its clients the Above and Beyond brochure along with a cover letter soliciting comments, Williamson said.

“The letters started hitting people’s mail boxes a week ago,” he said Thursday. “I’m getting 30 to 40 phone calls a day.”

The plan doesn’t make sense for people who don’t travel much, but Williamson’s clients, about 90% of them retired and over 55, are big travelers and know that for them the odds of dying away from home are high.

“One woman said she goes to Australia for three or four months every year to visit her daughter,” he said. “Another said she takes four or five cruises a year.”

Seven also hopes to make inroads with corporate travel departments, which could buy coverage for key executives and sales agents.

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While he is marketing a service plan rather than an insurance policy, Seven says his business works much the same way. Both kinds of companies make money playing the odds that premium income and investment returns will outstrip claims expenses.

He determined that of the 2.1 million U.S. residents who died in 1994, about 500,000 died more than 100 miles from home, including 80,000 in other states and 10,000 in foreign countries.

He crunched a few more numbers and determined that Sevcor will be profitable if he can sell 50,000 Above and Beyond plans--a goal he expects to meet by August.

Then, he says, he took the idea to a unit of American International Group, a $20-billion-a-year insurance conglomerate based in New York. AIG’s American Home Assurance Co. is guaranteeing the Above and Beyond plan--meaning Sevcor pays American Homes a hefty annual premium to insure it for reimbursement of the cost of the services it provides.

Both Sevcor and American Home are betting that there will be far more Above and Beyond plans sold than ever used because most plan holders won’t die far enough from their homes to use the body retrieval program--what one company brochure delicately calls a “repatriation” plan.

Officials at AIG could not be reached for comment, but Palm Mortuaries’ Williamson said he has verified that the company is guaranteeing to cover Sevcor’s costs.

The giant insurer “does a lot of product innovation and experimentation and must think this is a good one,” said analyst David Seifer of Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette Securities Corp. in New York. “It sure sounds innovative.”