100 Out of 100 People Said They’d Never Buy Travel Insurance. That Was the Opportunity.

Sasha Gainullin’s path into travel insurance started with a scholarship. Born and raised in Russia, he spent a year at 16 as an exchange student in Stevens Point, Wisconsin — a small town that happened to be home to Travel Guard, the company widely credited as the origin point of the modern US travel insurance industry. Travel Guard’s founder, John Noel — whom Sasha calls “the grandfather of travel insurance” in the US — offered him a scholarship to the University of Wisconsin in exchange for working Travel Guard’s call center, talking to customers and selling travel insurance. That scholarship program, Sasha noted, still exists today, funding students from inner-city Milwaukee, rural Wisconsin, and countries as far-flung as Kenya and Russia — a genuine, decades-early commitment to diversity and inclusion from a small-town Wisconsin insurance company in the 1990s. Now 43, Sasha is still, by his own count, selling travel insurance — just as the CEO and co-founder of his own company.

In Episode 64 of InsurTechTalk, Sasha and I covered how a career spent handling emergency medical evacuations in actual conflict zones led to founding Battleface, why COVID turned the company into unexpected media darlings almost overnight, and why he thinks embedded travel insurance’s real problem has never been the model itself — it’s how greedy the distribution commissions became.

About Sasha Gainullin

Sasha Gainullin is CEO and co-founder of Battleface, a global MGA (Lloyd’s cover holder) providing dynamically priced travel insurance for travelers, adventurers, and specialty groups that traditional one-size-fits-all policies routinely exclude. Before Battleface, he spent years at Travel Guard (later acquired by AIG) building out international emergency medical assistance operations across Asia, Latin America, Europe, and Africa, followed by founding Tangiers International, a subcontractor handling complex, on-the-ground medical assistance in hard-to-reach conflict zones including Iraq and parts of the Middle East and Africa.

Travel Insurance 101

Sasha’s plain-language definition: travel insurance protects you any time you travel roughly 100 miles from home, whether domestically or internationally, against unforeseen events — spanning financial protection for a prepaid trip (cancellation or interruption coverage), emergency medical assistance, and even equipment coverage. His own specialty within the category is emergency medical assistance specifically — the person on the other end of the call arranging an ambulance, a hospital transfer, or getting someone home safely when something goes wrong mid-trip.

He drew a favorable comparison to Passport Card, an Israel- and Germany-based travel insurance company he admires for a genuinely innovative early solution: a physical debit card, prepaid and always in a traveler’s pocket, that could directly cover hospital costs at the point of care — solving the reimbursement-timing problem years before Venmo or PayPal existed to make that kind of instant transfer trivial.

Why the US Is Still an “Immature” Travel Insurance Market

Sasha distinguished between mature travel insurance markets — where close to 100% of citizens buy coverage when traveling internationally — and immature markets like the US, where historically only a minority of travelers did. He traced the US market’s origin directly back to Travel Guard and John Noel: originally, travel insurance was purely financial protection for a prepaid trip (a couple saving up for a two-week vacation wanting their deposit protected against cancellation), with comprehensive medical, evacuation, and baggage benefits layered on over time.

The origin story he shared has a genuinely cinematic beat: when John Noel first pitched travel insurance as a business plan to the large Wisconsin insurer he worked for at the time, leadership rejected it — reinforced by a focus group where, by Sasha’s telling, all 100 participants said they’d never buy travel insurance. As Noel was walking out of that focus group, he asked why not — and nearly everyone said some version of “I don’t know anything about it.” Noel read that not as a rejection but as the actual opportunity: a genuine awareness gap, not a genuine lack of demand — and started the business himself out of his basement.

Sasha connected that awareness gap directly to a US-specific misconception: many American consumers historically assumed their domestic health insurance would cover them while traveling internationally, when in practice they’re almost always out-of-network abroad. He noted the broader public understanding of health insurance mechanics (deductibles, PPO networks) improved meaningfully among younger, millennial consumers following the public debate around the Affordable Care Act. The bigger, more measurable shift: roughly 20% of Americans bought travel insurance before COVID-19; that figure rose to roughly 60% afterward.

From Conflict-Zone Medical Assistance to Founding Battleface

After Travel Guard was acquired by AIG, Sasha spent years there building out international emergency medical assistance call center operations. He then left to found Tangiers International, an AIG subcontractor (and later a vendor to several other major insurers) specifically for medical assistance cases too complex or remote for phone-based coordination — cases requiring someone physically on the ground, face to face with a hospital or patient, in genuinely difficult locations across the Middle East, Africa, and elsewhere.

That work put him directly in front of a structural shift reshaping travel: platforms like Airbnb had fundamentally changed how, where, and how long people traveled, and a growing population of travelers — adventure travelers, journalists heading into conflict zones, people visiting increasingly obscure destinations — couldn’t find travel insurance that actually covered them. Standard policies routinely excluded war and terrorism, specific “risky” activities like scuba diving, or entire destinations flagged on a government travel advisory list — and those advisory triggers could shift overnight, instantly invalidating an otherwise valid policy for reasons entirely unrelated to the traveler’s actual destination or activity.

The Name: “We Put Our Face Out There, and Nobody Wants to Insure Us”

Battleface’s name traces directly to conversations Sasha had repeatedly with journalists heading into conflict zones, who kept telling him some version of: we go out to a battlefield, we put our face out there, and nobody wants to insure us. Working through the name with co-founder Chris (in Israel at the time) over a series of calls, the phrase “travel is a battle, put your face out there” became Battleface.

Fixing the Problem at the Underwriting Layer, Not the Marketing Layer

Rather than treating this as a distribution or marketing problem, Sasha and his co-founders went directly to Lloyd’s of London to understand why coverage had become so exclusion-heavy in the first place. Their finding: underwriters weren’t necessarily averse to insuring these riskier segments — what they lacked was the ability to move past one-size-fits-all pricing, a rigid product structure that had accumulated more and more blanket exclusions simply because travelers had diversified so much in how and where they traveled. What was actually missing was a technology platform capable of dynamically pricing risk and matching the right product to the right traveler in real time, rather than defaulting to broad exclusions as a blunt risk-management tool.

Structure: A Global MGA, Now With Its Own Capital

Battleface started as an MGA (the UK equivalent term is “cover holder”) under Lloyd’s. Co-founder Paul, who joined from Lloyd’s with roughly 40 years of underwriting experience, built the underlying underwriting algorithms; co-founder Anthony, a developer, built the technology platform that could price dynamically based on those algorithms — a build that Sasha said took a couple of years to get fully operational. Sasha’s example of what that dynamic pricing actually enables: Ukraine, a genuinely safe and appealing travel destination that became a live conflict zone — underwriters remain interested in insuring travel there, but only with a rate that actually reflects the real, current risk, a capability most travel insurers simply don’t have. Today, Battleface operates as a global MGA with full binding authority backed by Lloyd’s, and has since layered in its own reinsurance-backed captive — including backing from Greenlight Re — beginning to retain a portion of its own risk directly. Sasha noted, in passing, that reinsurers have often been ahead of the curve in funding insurtech innovation generally, given their constant need to find new risk worth reinsuring.

A Small Industry Where Everyone Has Worked Together Before

Asked how Battleface’s various co-founders came together, Sasha’s answer reflected how genuinely small and tightly networked the specialty travel insurance industry is: most senior people in the space have worked alongside each other in different combinations across AIG, Lloyd’s, and other major players over the years. Battleface’s own Chief Operating Officer, Mike, worked with Sasha for 20 years at AIG, later helped build out Berkshire Hathaway’s specialty business, and eventually rejoined Battleface. The company has grown enough additional co-founders and senior contributors over time that it’s largely stopped emphasizing founder titles at all, favoring a focus on what each person is actually responsible for.

Battleface officially went live as a Lloyd’s cover holder in January 2018, though — consistent with how genuinely complex standing up a regulated insurance business is — getting fully operational took roughly two years of work before that.

Market Size and Segments

At the time of recording, Battleface focused primarily on individual leisure travelers, with a growing push into business travel accident insurance — a related but structurally distinct market. Sasha cited leisure travel insurance as a roughly $40 billion global market, with business travel accident insurance representing a separate, fast-growing roughly $38 billion market — both figures excluding expatriate coverage, which functions closer to international private medical insurance and requires its own distinct expertise.

COVID: From Existential Shock to Overnight Media Darling

Battleface’s dynamic pricing model was originally built to account for terrorism, adventure activity, shifting government travel advisories, and — critically — short-term, regionally contained pandemics like SARS, bird flu, and Ebola, alongside underlying cost-of-care and evacuation cost data (US medical costs differ vastly from Vietnam’s, for instance, and Antarctica is exceptionally safe but exceptionally expensive to evacuate from). A sustained, global pandemic like COVID-19 was a genuinely bigger shock than the model had anticipated.

But where many competitors simply stopped selling travel insurance altogether around April 1, 2020 — roughly when COVID-19 was formally declared a pandemic — Battleface kept operating, including a distinctive feature letting travelers purchase a policy even while already mid-trip. By July 2020, as European travel cautiously resumed, Battleface was among the very few insurers still actively offering coverage amid ongoing government travel warnings and COVID exposure risk — and because the company had already built a reputation specifically for solving hard-to-insure cases like journalists in conflict zones, it became, in Sasha’s words, “darlings of the media.” The organic press coverage that followed (including, memorably, BBC coverage prompting a London friend to call and ask permission to swear on the phone) turned Battleface into a meaningful direct-to-consumer brand almost overnight.

Regulatory Tailwinds: Mandatory Insurance and Brexit

Sasha pointed to a growing number of countries requiring proof of travel insurance for entry (citing Israel and Costa Rica as examples) as a genuine market tailwind — a requirement he’d personally experienced for years applying for visas on a Russian passport, but which was newly extending to American and Canadian travelers as well. He also credited Brexit, somewhat unexpectedly, with boosting demand: UK travelers lost automatic reciprocal access to EU healthcare systems post-Brexit, adding a new, concrete reason to carry travel medical coverage that hadn’t previously applied to them.

Early Go-to-Market: Specialty Associations, Not Paid Ads

Before COVID, Battleface’s entry strategy focused on specialty associations and membership organizations requiring deep customization — his examples included an international surfing association representing roughly 25 million surfers worldwide (who care about surfboard coverage, not lost luggage) and the International Federation of Journalists (who care almost exclusively about medical and equipment coverage). As a startup, Battleface couldn’t afford either expensive direct-to-consumer paid acquisition or the roughly 60-70% upfront distribution fees required to embed into major channels like airlines and online travel agencies — economics that only established, large insurers can typically absorb. Instead, the company built early awareness organically, through content and articles, while building genuinely customized niche products for specific association memberships.

The Embedded Insurance Commission Problem

This was the sharpest structural critique in the conversation. Sasha referenced a widely read June 2020 New York Times article (“Is Travel Insurance Worth It?”) that was harshly critical of major travel insurers — Allianz and AIG among them — arguing that heavy exclusions left policies with essentially no real value to consumers, largely driven by high embedded distribution commissions. He confirmed the scale of that commission problem directly: while typical P&C agent commissions run 10-20%, travel insurance distribution partners (airlines, online travel agencies) have historically commanded 70%, sometimes as high as 80% of premium — with some insurers even prepaying commissions upfront to win those distribution relationships, triggering bidding wars between insurers with nothing to do with product quality or customer value.

Regulators have started responding: Sasha referenced US congressional scrutiny of these commission structures, a wave of class-action lawsuits against major travel insurers and airline partners (Delta, Allianz, United, and AIG among those named) over policies that misled customers about coverage that was later denied during the pandemic, and Australia’s regulatory cap limiting travel insurance distribution commissions to a maximum of 20% specifically to protect consumers.

His broader diagnosis of what makes embedded insurance actually harmful to consumers: when a distribution channel effectively becomes a single-insurer monopoly (an airline picks whichever insurer bids the highest commission) and the customer has neither the time nor the motivation to evaluate an insurance offer presented as a quick add-on during an unrelated purchase (booking a flight), the customer ends up stuck with one option, in a market where genuine price and coverage competition has been squeezed out entirely. He was careful to note this isn’t an inherent flaw in embedded distribution itself — traditional insurers like AIG and Allianz effectively pioneered and perfected embedded travel insurance decades ago (Travel Guard, for instance, was the official white-label travel insurance provider for Walt Disney travel bookings). The actual problem, in his view, is what happens when distribution partners’ commission demands escalate into a pure bidding war disconnected from customer value.

Parametric Insurance: A Technology Layer, Not a New Category

Asked for his view on parametric insurance products emerging around flight delays, cancellations, and lost baggage, Sasha was direct: he considers parametric fundamentally a technology layer — a way to track a triggering event and pay out instantly — rather than a genuinely distinct category of insurance, since real underwriting and risk decision-making still sit underneath it regardless of how the payout is automated.

His specific concern with some parametric providers: an apparent effort by some companies to avoid insurance regulatory requirements by labeling payouts as a “financial benefit” rather than insurance, even though from the consumer’s perspective the function is identical to an insurance claim payout. He also flagged a real underinsurance risk in narrowly scoped, single-event parametric products (his example: a standalone missed-connection payout) sold without the fuller range of coverage a traveler actually needs — baggage, medical expenses, trip cancellation — especially given how little consumers already understand about travel insurance broadly. His conclusion: providers, as the domain experts, have a genuine responsibility to deliver the full relevant set of benefits to a customer rather than a single flashy parametric feature that leaves real gaps.

Recommendation: Weird TV, Done Well

Asked for a closing recommendation, Sasha pointed to Yellowjackets, which he’d just finished — a show about a female soccer team surviving a 1996 plane crash, part survival drama and part Lost-style mystery, with genuinely strong acting, and one he’s eagerly awaiting a second season of. More broadly, he described himself as a fan of “weird” television, naming The Leftovers and David Lynch’s Twin Peaks as personal all-time favorites for their willingness to depart from conventional storytelling.

Key Takeaways

• Battleface’s founding insight was that travel insurance’s exclusion problem was fundamentally a pricing and underwriting limitation, not underwriter risk-aversion — building a platform to price dynamically, rather than exclude broadly, was the company’s core technical bet
• The company operates as a global MGA (Lloyd’s cover holder) with full binding authority, and has since added its own reinsurance-backed captive (including Greenlight Re) to begin retaining risk directly rather than purely fronting through Lloyd’s
• COVID-19 nearly broke Battleface’s original pandemic-pricing assumptions (built around short, regional outbreaks like SARS and Ebola), but the company’s decision to keep operating while most competitors stopped selling coverage entirely turned it into an unexpected media-driven, organic direct-to-consumer brand
• Regulatory tailwinds — countries increasingly mandating proof of travel insurance for entry, and Brexit stripping UK travelers of automatic EU healthcare reciprocity — have materially expanded the addressable travel insurance market beyond pure voluntary purchase
• Embedded travel insurance’s real historical problem was runaway distribution commissions (as high as 70-80% of premium, versus 10-20% typical in P&C), not the embedded model itself — a dynamic now drawing regulatory scrutiny, class-action litigation, and hard commission caps in markets like Australia
• When an embedded insurance channel effectively becomes a single-insurer monopoly and customers have neither time nor motivation to evaluate coverage mid-purchase, genuine price and quality competition disappears — a cautionary structural lesson for any insurtech building an embedded distribution strategy
• Sasha views parametric insurance as a payout-automation technology layer rather than a distinct insurance category, and cautions against both regulatory-avoidance framing (“financial benefit” instead of insurance) and underinsurance risk when narrow, single-trigger parametric products are sold without broader necessary coverage