We are a travel insurance brokerage, which sounds very unexciting.
And you may say, well, what is that?
Travel insurance, who is even interested in travel insurance?
Why does that even matter?
So I used to be a luxury tour operator for almost 20 years.
I ran very high-end luxury tours.
And COVID came and really destroyed us for like three years.
I didn't make any money for my family. It was crazy.
And we were very successful up until that time.
And I knew coming out of COVID, no one was going to book these tours without travel insurance.
Everyone was way too nervous.
And so I wasn't the type of operator to just say, like, really everyone else in the world, I'll be honest with you,
every tour operator in America were in the same boat as me.
They were all destroyed. They were all coming back.
They knew that no one was going to book without travel insurance.
What all of them did, except for me, I'm not saying this to be boastful, just like a fact, is they said, yeah,
go to Allianz, which is the biggest travel insurance company in America,
go to AIG, you know, I don't know, buy a policy, then come, give me your money and come to my tour.
I wasn't happy with that approach because everything I did was to the top level.
And it was, like you say, to help people.
I wanted to make sure people are giving me money, they're getting value for their money.
And so I became obsessed with travel insurance just for my own business.
I said, it's not going to work unless people feel comfortable to book.
No one will feel comfortable to book without travel insurance.
But I wasn't comfortable just saying go buy whatever.
So I started studying every policy that exists in America.
I started going to all industry events.
I started meeting the CEOs of these companies, started meeting the head of the claims department.
I said, how does this really work? Who's actually paying these bills?
How does this whole structure operate?
And I started to realize over time that my mind worked very well.
I understood it very well for whatever reason.
It just clicked for me when a lot of people find it very complicated and confusing.
It wasn't like that for me.
And I went to eventually start selling them to my own clients.
And I knew which policy was good for them now.
I knew which company would easily pay them.
I understood all the clauses.
And I made commission off it too, which is great.
And I went to all the other tour operators in my niche.
There were quite a few.
And I said, look, I know these guys.
I've been doing this 20 years. I know everyone in the industry.
I said, look, you guys are in the same boat as me, right?
You need help. You guys know nothing about travel insurance.
You need help for your clients.
Send them to us.
I started a secondary company called Travel Defend.
Send them to us.
We're going to help them.
We're going to be a concierge service.
We're going to help your people.
We're going to do the paperwork for them.
We're going to make sure, most importantly in real life, they actually get paid if they have a problem.
And we'll kick you guys back commission.
And they said, cool.
And they started sending us boatloads of people.
We're talking thousands of people.
And I really realized very quickly that this is a tremendous need in the market.
Because I'm not talking about probably yourself.
You look like a young guy going on a cheap trip, maybe medical, whatever.
It's $100. That's not really my target, right?
I'll help people like you. We do.
I have a whole team of almost 20 employees now.
But we'll help whoever comes to us.
However, where is the money in travel insurance?
Older people, very expensive trips.
I'll give you an example.
We did a policy the other day.
Two couples.
They're almost 80 years old, these couples.
Going to Africa.
$90,000 per couple trip to Africa.
Their travel insurance was almost $20,000.
Because they may say on the phone, well, that's expensive.
It's not expensive.
It's a function of your trip cost and your age.
It's just a percentage of your trip cost.
So you look at it.
Every policy is a little different.
But how much is that?
11%, 12% of trip cost.
That's not abnormal.
It's just your trip is $180,000.
So you're going to pay $18,000 to $20,000 in travel insurance.
Makes sense once they understand it.
And then we figure out what's good for them.
But the point is, how do people buy travel insurance now without us?
And by the way, this is a billion.
When I say billion, I mean, I'm talking Allianz themselves did $1.3 billion in sales last year.
I mean, the industry does $10, $12, $13 billion, whatever it is in America.
How do people right now buy travel insurance?
They go to a website like Allianz or AIG, which again, offers you one or two options.
Which do you know what you're buying?
No, you have no clue what you're buying.
No, nobody does.
Even the richest, most well-versed traveler, they don't know anything about travel insurance.
They just buy whatever they see there.
Or you can go to like an Expedia type website that has a thousand options.
And again, do you know anything?
No.
More importantly, what do any of these people do in real life when they have a problem?
They're faceless.
They're nothing to these companies.
No matter how wealthy they are, they're in irrelevance.
They're one of billion other people.
With us, we figure out what's good for you.
We're experts at everything.
I don't have one or two options.
I have every option that exists.
We're experts. I have a whole team that are experts in all of them.
We'll figure out what's good for you.
We'll do the paperwork for you.
And then most importantly, the most important part, we now bring millions of dollars to these companies.
We have tremendous power in these companies.
I have my own dedicated claims analyst who are dedicated at the company.
I don't pay their salary.
The company pays their salary, but they're dedicated just to my clients.
My clients get priority treatment.
We get them paid in oftentimes seven to 14 days, sometimes even quicker, which in the world of travel insurance is unheard of.
Normally it's four to six months to get paid.
And we add zero cost.
We don't add a penny to the cost.
So you say, well, once you understand it, why would anyone not use you?
There's no reason not to use us because we're the same price.
We give tremendous benefit.
We're only here to help you.
We have a WhatsApp that's monitored 24 hours a day.
Let's say you're in Spain, break your leg, whatever it is, God forbid, obviously, and you need help.
Our team is available to you over WhatsApp 24 hours a day.
We have the personal cell phone number of the emergency assist company, CEO, et cetera.
So what we do, we're the only ones that do what we do in America.
There's nobody else doing this.
I don't really need tremendous business help.
And I'll tell you why, because most businesses do struggle very badly.
And the reason for that is that they haven't found the proper niche and the proper differentiator.
Right.
They're kind of fighting up against a world of competition, which is hard.
We've somehow found a situation.
This is why I stopped doing tours, because I realized this over time.
I'm like, holy crap, this is crazy.
What we do doesn't exist.
The market is billions.
If all billion of the people that went to Allianz, for example, or AIG, or Travel Insurance International, any of these companies knew about us, they would all use us.
Of course they would.
Why wouldn't they?
So all we're doing is creating new partners in terms of tour operators, travel agents who send us their clients.
And we're going after end users with marketing, Facebook ads, things like that, which, again, I haven't even started that yet, but it's going to probably start literally next week.
And I haven't started it only because I haven't had to.
I mean, we're literally doing millions of dollars without a penny of marketing ever spent.
So that's the basic gist of what's going on here.