Guidana – Swiss RE
Guidana was a startup developed in cooperation with Swiss Re, focused on making travel safer through smarter insurance selection and real-time risk awareness. The idea addressed a simple but critical problem: travelers often lack clear information about safety risks, emergency procedures, and suitable insurance, especially when moving across borders.
The solution combined destination-based risk analysis, insurance recommendations, and real-time notifications into a single conversational experience. Users were guided already in the planning phase, warned about nearby threats during travel via push notifications, and provided with clear instructions on what to do in risky situations, including emergency contacts, nearby embassies, ICE numbers, and country-specific hotlines.
A key differentiator was the end-to-end approach. Guidana did not just show data on a map, it actively helped users decide, react, and stay safe. The concept also explored deep integration with insurance providers through chatbots and IVR systems, reducing repetitive call-center queries while increasing response speed and user satisfaction, especially among younger, mobile-first travelers. The solution also incorporated real-time analysis of whistleblower and incident-reporting data, transforming Guidana into a complex emergency assistant capable of reacting dynamically to emerging threats rather than relying only on static risk information.
The MVP was designed as a Messenger-based chatbot, aligning with how young users already communicate. This allowed fast testing, low friction onboarding, and measurable insights into user behavior, conversion, and support needs.
Guidana won the Swiss Re international Hackathon among 26 teams, validating both the relevance of the problem and the strength of the proposed solution. The project demonstrated how conversational interfaces, real-time data, and insurance logic can be combined into a scalable, user-friendly safety platform.