The Risk Management System in the Passenger Shipping Companies

The aim of this paper is to analyse the measures aimed at protecting firms, specifically the Risk Management techniques, viewed as an innovative example of risk management including both prevention and insurance coverage. Protection of firms is a field in which managerial innovations are urgently required because of different reasons: likely enough, from the theoretical and practical point of view management of malicious or accidental events is the least advanced area among the different areas of the overall management of an organisation. The need for urgent measures in this field is the result of a higher social awareness of the importance of safety, of the trend of law-makers to regulate dangerous activities and protect individuals exposed to risk, of the evolution of technologies that are becoming increasingly complex and dangerous. Malicious and accidental events imply substantial costs that in the most severe cases can even exceed the company's financial capability. An accurate management of these events can then be a valuable source of saving. However there is no doubt that the risk management practice, basically meant as management of the firm's mere risks, is scarcely known and implemented in Italy. This low level of attention paid to risk management and governance seems to be due to the Italian managers' trend to underestimate or ignore any risks of harmful events and to their incapability of developing a safety-oriented behaviour (more frequently recorded in other countries), through the implementation of risk protection and prevention policies. This low level of propensity to manage and govern mere risks is also due to a specific firm-insurance company relationship characterised by both co-operation and conflicts: nowadays firms do not want "traditional" insurance policies only; they require a range of quality innovative insurance-financial products and above all advisory and a wide range of services. The insurance company (a component of the operational structure and, then, a sub-system of the financial system), demands instead information and data on the actual economic and financial position (then on the actual needs) of the enterprise to be insured. In its conclusion this paper illustrates the "case history" of "Pride of America", a luxury cruiser that in 2004 was the subject of a major accident insurance.