Sensible Weather is the leading Weather Guarantee provider for travel and hospitality, offering proactive reimbursements when rain or extreme heat impacts guests' experiences. Available through top industry partners, Sensible’s Weather Guarantee enhances guest peace of mind while driving revenue and bookings for partners. Since 2019, Sensible has sold over 500,000 Weather Guarantees and is backed by leading investors, including the National Science Foundation, Infinity Ventures, Amex Ventures, and the PGA of America.
I began my career in academia, earning a masters, PhD and completing post-doctoral work at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in the climate sciences, where I collaborated with the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy. My work focused on processing weather and climate data using supercomputers to assess both physical and financial climate risks. In 2016, I transitioned from academia to the hedge fund sector, joining Cumulus, which was later acquired by Citadel. There, I applied weather analytics to understand energy market supply and demand dynamics, largely driven by (probabilistically) predictable weather fluctuations.
Throughout all this, my love for skiing and outdoor activities remained constant. I experienced firsthand how weather could affect the quality of outdoor experiences, and I realized how much more approachable these activities would be if weather disruptions were less of a concern. This passion for skiing and the outdoors, combined with my subject matter expertise, drove me to think about how I could address this issue – notwithstanding, travel e-commerce is one of the largest global economies that is existentially impacted by things like extreme weather and climate change.
After leaving the hedge fund world, my goal was to bridge my academic expertise in physics and science with the financial products being priced and traded as a quantitative analyst. I realized I could figure out a real solution to weather negatively impacting outdoor experiences, and in 2019, Sensible Weather was born. The idea was simple: give customers the ability to add a Weather Guarantee to reservations for hotels, campgrounds, ticketed attractions and more, and automatically reimburse them if a threshold of negative weather (currently either precipitation or high temperature) was met.
My ultimate goal was to build a product that was relevant for as many people as possible to show them directly why climate matters in their life. I think the idea behind the Weather Guarantee is super appealing—it turns the whole insurance idea on its head, making it all data-driven and very consumer experience oriented.
Today, Sensible Weather operates in the $2 trillion global hospitality and outdoor experiences market, partnering with businesses across various sectors, including hospitality, camping/glamping, skiing, golf, ticketed attractions, events, sports, and more.
Sensible Weather is trusted by over 5,000 travel and hospitality partners, including Sabre, Amadeus, GolfNow, Hipcamp, Campspot, Alterra Mountain Company, Inntopia, and the Curator Hotel Collection.
Our Weather Guarantee offers significant benefits for both guests and our partners. For partners, Weather Guarantees increase booking conversion rate and reduce cancellations. For consumers, Weather Guarantees enhance satisfaction by ensuring a seamless experience, no matter the weather conditions. As travel and hospitality companies face the growing challenges of a more unpredictable climate, they are seeking solutions that mitigate risks for guests while elevating the overall experience. Our Weather Guarantees provide peace of mind, giving consumers confidence in their plans and ensuring a positive outcome.
As examples, Hipcamp has seen an increase in booking conversion of 1.6%, increase in AOV was 2.4%, and a 1.8% decrease in cancellations. Val Cenis ski area saw a 7pt increase in the percentage of trips booked in advance, with a CSAT of 4/5.
Coming from a technical background, I feel that I was fairly privileged earlier on in fundraising, team building, and product development, toward the vision of massively simplifying the extremely complex landscape of climate data management and risk analytics into an accessible and ‘real’ everyday financial consumer product. By and large, the Weather Guarantee works exactly how I expected it to work before even the first line of code was written.
That said, I did not (at all) have a background in sales. Trading financial products in liquid markets has the distinct advantage of being able to seamlessly transact at the click of a button. The biggest learning to date, at least for me, is that sales is the most difficult and uncertain component in company building.
Initially, we thought that building a product that was a revenue center for partners and merchants, while offering a demonstrable value-add to consumers would result in a straightforward sales process. After all, there are many ancillary financial product analogues out there that have been successful – from traditional travel insurance to BNPL, product warranties, to fare locks.
We thought that, as software providers in the travel space, integrating our partners' systems across different industries would be a straightforward process. However, we quickly realized that operators across different verticals (camping, hospitality, ski, golf) have a wide range of methods and workflows for handling things like cancellations, modifications, and no-shows, depending on the needs of their customers. This diversity in approaches has required us to be more flexible and adaptable in how we design, sell, and implement our solutions, ensuring they can accommodate the various systems and processes our partners use to best serve their clientele.
The silver lining here is that once you’ve made it through these pre- and post-sales processes with a partner, they are very unlikely to rip out the code, making our partnerships sticky and durable long term.
Our investors have been incredibly helpful in two key ways. First, their deep understanding of the complex regulations and infrastructure requirements in fintech has been invaluable, as navigating this space can be challenging. Second, they've shown immense patience, recognizing that building scalable fintech solutions takes time, allowing us the space to grow and develop at the right pace.
The future of Sensible is incredibly promising as we continue to focus on addressing the growing impact of weather volatility, which will only increase in the travel and hospitality industries. There's a huge opportunity not just to protect consumers, but also to expand into providing weather protection solutions for businesses. As the market for weather-related risk management continues to evolve, Sensible is well-positioned to lead the way in innovative solutions for both consumers and businesses, having already secured the major distribution hubs that connect to and serve brick-and-mortar merchants with digital solutions. Our ultimate goal is to create a three-pronged approach to build financial resilience to weather volatility, comprising the Weather Guarantee, B2B Analytics, and Weather Insurance.
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