How can a former ultra-luxury tour manager revolutionize the travel insurance industry? Discover this and more as we chat with Ben Camille, founder and CEO of Travel Defend, on this week's episode of the Travel Masters podcast. Ben shares his unique journey from organizing high-end travel experiences to creating a bespoke travel insurance brokerage service that’s tailored for both travel agents and luxury travelers. The pandemic underscored the critical need for dependable travel insurance, and Ben’s hands-on approach ensures clients are well-protected and claims are swiftly managed. Learn how Travel Defend stands out by offering expert advice, managing paperwork, and providing exceptional emergency support at no extra cost.
This episode also delves into how Travel Defend simplifies the complexities of travel insurance for travel agents, allowing them to focus on crafting unforgettable trips. Ben discusses the advantages of partnering with Travel Defend—avoiding misinformation, accessing a database of over 25,000 travelers, and targeting specific client segments more effectively. Tune in to hear how Travel Defend’s specialized expertise makes a significant difference, ensuring travelers are covered and agents can operate without the hassle of becoming insurance experts. Whether you’re a travel agent or a luxury traveler, you won't want to miss the valuable insights and seamless services offered by Travel Defend.
How can a former ultra-luxury tour manager revolutionize the travel insurance industry? Discover this and more as we chat with Ben Camille, founder and CEO of Travel Defend, on this week's episode of the Travel Masters podcast. Ben shares his unique journey from organizing high-end travel experiences to creating a bespoke travel insurance brokerage service that’s tailored for both travel agents and luxury travelers. The pandemic underscored the critical need for dependable travel insurance, and Ben’s hands-on approach ensures clients are well-protected and claims are swiftly managed. Learn how Travel Defend stands out by offering expert advice, managing paperwork, and providing exceptional emergency support at no extra cost.
This episode also delves into how Travel Defend simplifies the complexities of travel insurance for travel agents, allowing them to focus on crafting unforgettable trips. Ben discusses the advantages of partnering with Travel Defend—avoiding misinformation, accessing a database of over 25,000 travelers, and targeting specific client segments more effectively. Tune in to hear how Travel Defend’s specialized expertise makes a significant difference, ensuring travelers are covered and agents can operate without the hassle of becoming insurance experts. Whether you’re a travel agent or a luxury traveler, you won't want to miss the valuable insights and seamless services offered by Travel Defend.
Welcome to the Travel Masters podcast. We're here to help travel advisors and travel agency owners get what they really want from their business. I'm Morris Sims and I'm going to be your host for our podcast. I'm an ex-chemical engineer turned life insurance agent. I got to tell you selling life insurance was a lot more fun for me than being an engineer. After a few years, they asked me to teach other people how to do what I was doing. And well, long story short, we wound up in New York City for 20 years. That was quite a change for a young Alabama boy. I retired after 20 years as the vice president and chief learning officer, where my team and I trained over 12,000 agents and their managers to be independent business owners and sales professionals. Now I'm not one to stop working, so I started my own business and I was blessed to find a sweet spot with travel professionals that I was able to help. Now I've got several travel agency consulting clients and I'm the co-founder of the Travel Masters Learning Community, where we provide opportunities for travel professionals to become more effective, efficient and to get what they want from their business.
Speaker 1:
On this podcast, I'm going to be interviewing guests that I believe are going to have a message that can be of help to you. Our travel professional community and I'll do some solo episodes as well with some other stuff that I really think can help you in your business. So, with all that said, hey, let's get this party started with today's episode. What do you say? Welcome to the Travel Masters podcast. Today we're really excited about having our guest, ben Camille, with us. He's the founder and CEO of Travel Defend and you guys know me I'm Morris Sims with Travel Masters Learning Community and we're just really excited to be able to talk a little bit about what Ben does and what he can do to be of service to you and help you in your business. So, ben, thanks for being on the show, welcome, we're glad you're here.
Speaker 2:
Thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here, hey, just get us started.
Speaker 1:
Give us a brief overview of who you are and what Travel Defend is and how it all works.
Speaker 2:
Right. If you're a travel agent, tour operator, this kind of stuff is going to be really interesting to you. So I used to run luxury tours for almost 20 years. When I'm talking luxury, I'm saying Uber luxury. I mean my clients would pay one, two, three $400,000 a family just for a week event. Okay. So when we were running those tours, everything had to be just perfect Okay, especially when you're going to that level. I'll make a story quick as I can. Covid really took us out in a bad way. Coming back, it was all in California this event.
Speaker 2:
Coming back from COVID, I realized that no one is going to book without travel insurance. There's way too much money on the line. Everyone was really freaked out and, being the operator that I was, I wasn't happy to just say, okay, go buy Allianz, go buy whatever's out there. I was saying it's a black box, right. Who actually pays these bills? How does this actually work? How can I give my clients a leg up in this situation? And so it's a little weird to say, but I got obsessed with travel insurance. I just started learning about it. My brain worked so well, I understood it just intuitively. I went to all the industry events. I met all the CEOs of these companies. I met the head of the claims department. I said which companies really pay people? Some are great to work with, some are terrible. You kill yourself trying to work with these guys.
Speaker 2:
Eventually I really learned the industry really well. I started selling it to my own clients. I went to all the other tour operators in my niche and I said look, you guys are in the same boat. You have all these clients coming in. Does anyone know what they're buying with travel insurance? No, no one knows what the hell they're buying. Does anyone know what to do in real life if they have a problem? No, they're faceless, nothing to these companies. So I said to them come to us, we're going to take care of your clients, we're going to help you, because obviously tour operators in general travel agents they don't know anything about travel insurance and they certainly can't help their clients in real life. If someone is in Spain called hey, I broke my leg, what do you? What do I do? Travel agents are like duh, I don't know. They don't know what to do.
Speaker 2:
We created a brokerage concierge, the only one of its kind that exists in America. It's called Travel Defend, where we're a concierge service. That's the heavy lifting of what we do. We now work with hundreds tour operators, travel agents. We have thousands and thousands of clients. People will call us. Typically you could also buy online, but people will call us our team.
Speaker 2:
We have over 20 employees here now. We are trained to figure out. We'll have a conversation. Figure out what's good for you, where are you going, what policy, what state do you live in, do the paperwork for you and then, most importantly this is really the most important part we don't just sell this to you and disappear. Okay, we're with you. We'll make sure you get paid in real life, make sure you're protected in real life, Because at this point, we bring millions of dollars to these travel insurance companies.
Speaker 2:
We have tremendous power. We have our own dedicated claims analysts at these companies. We have CEOs personal cell phone numbers and we add zero cost. We don't add a penny to the cost For the client experience. It's what they need and what they want.
Speaker 2:
You have a client, let's say, going to a $50,000 South African trip. Okay, these people want to know. I'm nervous, it's 50 grand. What about medical? What about all my issues? They're not comfortable just saying go to Allianz, pick one or two options. You don't even know what the hell you're picking. I'm not disparaging Allianz we could sell Allianz as well but the point is you don't know what you're buying, and so when you come to us, we figure you out. We also have a WhatsApp that we set up with every client. That's monitored 24 hours a day and so at any time a client can reach out to us say hey, I am in Spain, I broke my leg, what do I do? Right? Robin Assist, which is on the backend. They're the 24-hour assist company for many of these travel insurance companies. We have the CEO. His name is Mike Meeks. We have his personal cell phone number.
Speaker 2:
In Israel, we had over 4,000 clients on October 7th. At that one time just to give you volume of what we do we were helping everyone get flights out and hospital. We had people faint. We had all these medical issues getting everyone's hotels paid. This is massive what we bring to the table. We had all these medical issues getting everyone's hotels paid. This is massive what we bring to the table. We give commission back to tour operators, travel agents. We add zero cost. The clients love what we do, and that's the basic gist of what Travel Defend does.
Speaker 1:
So basically, you do for the travel industry the same thing that travel agents do for the clientele out there, the customers they work with. They make it so that all they have to do is show them how fun and you make it so that the travel agent, all they have to do is call you and they don't have to worry about insurance and getting it to work and making travel insurance an easy thing rather than something they've got to figure out how to explain to a potential traveler.
Speaker 2:
I mean, do you know how many travel agents and tour operators we work with that lament that they're even involved in this? They're like look, I want to focus on my core business, I want to focus on my clients, but they know they can't help. They're not A, they're not licensed, they're not allowed to answer any questions. Many times, if they do answer questions, they're answering wrong. Do you know how many people called us and said oh, I'm a New York resident, I can't buy cancel for any reason. What are you talking about? Where do you even think that? Oh, my travel agent told me what the hell are they talking about? Your travel agent can't sell it to you because they're not licensed.
Speaker 2:
The point is there's so much misinformation. People have no clue what they're doing. If you're a travel agent, you're a tour operator. You actually and I know they do, by the way they care about their clients. They really do care, just like I did when I was a tour. I cared tremendously about my clients.
Speaker 2:
That's why it's better that you step out and you don't try and do this, because it's not your core capability, right, and so that's why, once we started really going out there that's why I do these podcasts and we have hundreds of partners and we've never once had a partner start with us and ever stop, because once they start and all they do is they step out. They say look, I strongly recommend you get travel insurance. Call Travel Defender to take care of you. Client calls we take care of them. Clients are loving it. Go look at our reviews. We have tons of Google reviews, a lot of passion there. No-transcript. We can do such good work for the people and that's what kind of gets us going, but it's also what helps us to be successful, right?
Speaker 1:
Absolutely, and you know it's amazing. I know a lot of travel advisors out there who do the research and they do the work and it takes their time and effort to do that, but they do the very best they can to know what they need to know about whatever travel insurance they're using.
Speaker 2:
But that's only half the game, man. Knowing what to know is half the other half is who are you? You're nothing, you're faceless, nothing to these companies, right? And so even if you say, oh, I have my own rep there, that rep is not the head of the claims department, that rep is not the CEO. You know what I mean. I know how this game works, yeah no, I'm not suggesting anything different.
Speaker 1:
All I'm saying is that, in recognizing the fact that the travel advisors out there there are plenty of them who really work hard at doing it well, but it's still not the primary thing that they have to deal with. They've still got to plan the travel and deal with all the rest of that, and we all hope and pray that we never have to make a claim. But when one comes in golly, it seems like it'd be so much easier to call you than it would be to have to be the go-between between my traveler and the insurance company.
Speaker 2:
Right, we have our own claims team here who will start the claim on behalf of the client. Go with the client and hold their hand, really go over what exactly do you need to provide, and then we give it to our dedicated claims analysts at the company, who are dedicated just to our clients, and, instead of being in the bucket of millions of people, you're going to get paid. It's not assuming you give in what you need to give in. You're going to get paid within seven days, 14 days, things like that. So, yeah, no, it's a tough process. You know it is tough and if you don't know what you're doing, it certainly is, and I agree with you.
Speaker 1:
And it's not something that that necessarily you get and you shouldn't get a whole lot of training and desire to deal with that. If you're a travel advisor, you've got more important things to do for your business than be an expert in the travel insurance industry, so you bring that expertise to the table. That, frankly, if I'm a travel advisor, I need that expertise and I don't want to deal with trying to be the travel insurance expert.
Speaker 2:
It's an entirely new business. All we do here is travel insurance, so I don't know anything about booking flights. I don't know anything about booking hotels. I don't know anything about anything except travel insurance, and that's why it's so powerful and that's what's a lot of times lost in translation. Especially if you have a luxury client and you want to make sure they're protected properly, this is the best way to do that.
Speaker 1:
It just makes good sense to me, that's for sure. Now do you work through the agent? I mean, does the agent call you and say I've got a traveler that needs insurance for this trip coming up this, that and the other? How does that process?
Speaker 2:
work Typically not Right, Typically not Typically. We like the agents to stay out of it. We like them just to say look, I'm your travel agent. I recommend you get travel insurance. You don't have to, but I recommend you do strongly, Call travel defend, they will take care of you.
Speaker 2:
That's the move, because the agent many times, especially early on, because they're nervous, they don't know us whatever, they get involved in a level that's just unnecessary. Like the clients themselves, these are smart, intelligent people. They're going to have their own questions and that's going to help us figure out what is the best option for this client. If they say to us my mom is sick, what about pre-existing conditions? And we could get very deep into this kind of stuff. And so it's just better to have the agent step out. Let us talk to the people directly, because many times the agent tries to get involved, there's a lot of broken telephone going on. We don't really know what's happening here. Then the client doesn't even really understand. It's just there's a lot of problems with that. So once an agent can really let go and just say look, call TravelDefend, they'll take care of you. Talk to your client. After we speak to them, You'll see your client will be happy.
Speaker 1:
That's a fact. I think if I were an advisor today, I would want to be able to introduce you to my clients individually and live and in person and have that initial conversation and then, like you say, turn it over to you guys, let you handle it from here. But I'd like to be involved rather than just say hey, call them. I'd rather set up a call and put you two in touch that way rather than put it on my client to have to make the call.
Speaker 1:
My job is to make it easy on them. I don't want to tell them go call somebody. I want to say look, let's on the third. We're going to meet with the insurance experts and we'll be able to put that together for you.
Speaker 2:
It depends the volume. You know, rick, it really depends. Every travel agent's different. Like, if you have a thousand clients you don't have the energy for that. We have a lot of travel agents. Tour operators are doing major volume through here and they just like you know what here, just deal with it. If you wanted to do that, yeah, we certainly could do that, but after you work with us for months you'll see it's just unnecessary. Like the clients, they can call, no problem, we can take care of them. It's just a comfortability factor. That's there and I hear what you're saying. But it's easy for the clients.
Speaker 2:
You know what's funny? That I realized over doing this how desperate especially luxury people are who have a lot of money on the line. They're so desperate for this help, they want it bad. They really do want someone to talk to who's a real expert. You call a travel insurance company who. Are you getting Someone in the Philippines? I mean, you're not getting anyone, and so they really are desperate. Everyone trained here. We're not just trained, we're experts by fire because we do thousands here and so anyone who's worked with us for at least on our team hired for at least four or five months. The knowledge they have would be on par, if not higher, than the CEOs of many of these companies, because the CEOs are like in their ivory tower. We're dealing with real clients and real questions, minute to minute, all day here, and so the knowledge that we have and the power we have is crazy.
Speaker 2:
One thing I want to mention which is cool and not all travel agents have to take advantage of it. I would say probably about 75% of travel agents do take advantage of it. We have a database of over 25,000 travelers Anyone that travels with us. We have all the data. We know where they traveled, we know how expensive their trip was, we know their dates of birth, we know where they live. We have everything. We know how expensive their trip was, we know their dates of birth, we know where they live. We have everything.
Speaker 2:
Travel agents that partner with us and want to be involved we will give them access to our database and we want to help them to market to our database, because our database is so powerful and so we don't just mass market to 20,000. We have over 25,000 clients in our database right now, so we don't just mass market, but we'll say to you okay, give me your perfect, ideal client. Who is it? And I'll say, well, maybe over 60 years old, living on the East coast. They pay over four grand, between four and eight grand, a trip. Let's say I can immediately find you thousands of those people. These are real travelers. This is not like made up. This is people who actually travel in real life. I can show you the database. We even have credit cards. We have everyone's credit cards. We have everything.
Speaker 2:
If we say to you, once you're partnering with us, we'll give you 50 people a month. 50 might not sound like a lot, but when it's hyper-targeted to what you want and we won't just give you the names and the stuff we're going to find those 50. You give us your offer, your ad, or, let's say, you just want to introduce yourself, cause a lot of people call here asking for travel agent. I need a travel agent. Who do you recommend? And you know we work with so many. We're not going to get involved in that, but you can hit your 50 with your ad and they'll open the ad because it comes from us. They already work with us, they already know us. We already are in everyone's phones, on their WhatsApp. We're with everyone texts and emails, and so we want to not just help your clients with travel insurance, we want to help you grow your business.
Speaker 2:
Any travel agent or tour operator will tell you the hardest thing is marketing. Very hard to market. Everyone's like well, word of mouth. Or if you're going to start getting in the game of Google ads, facebook ads, this is like killer. It's very expensive, we add no cost. We're not charging for this marketing. We just want to work with you on the travel insurance. So if you're willing to work with us, then we'll give you access.
Speaker 2:
Now some travel agents say we don't want our clients being in the database and all that. Fine, you don't have to. But then the marketing option is off the table Because, let's say, we have it all tagged. We know your client because we give you commission. If one of your clients, let's say, books a trip with another tour operator or whatever, we get commission for that, just like any travel agent. If I bring a group to a tour, if that was your client originally, we'll hit you up with the commissions.
Speaker 2:
You may not even be involved A year from now. Your client originally, we'll hit you up with the commissions. So you may not even be involved. A year from now your client books something else. They're not going to always book with you everything. Okay, it's not reasonable. But let's say they see a tour that came through us and that's your client. We're going to hit you with commission on that, and so people who get involved, they love the system. There's so many benefits here and it just takes time. In the beginning, like a meeting, we show you the database, we show you what we're doing, and then we have a lot of very trusted partners. There's a lot going on here.
Speaker 1:
Ben, kind of switching gears just a little bit, when somebody calls you and says, gee, I'm going to take a river cruise in Europe and I'm spending $8,000, $9,000, $10,000. I'll take a river cruise in Europe and I'm spending $8,000, $9,000, $10,000. I want travel insurance. What sort of benefits does travel insurance? When I say that that's a very generic thing and now you're going to take that and go talk to a number of different insurance companies, what are the benefits we're talking about?
Speaker 2:
Well, if I'm hearing your question correctly, it's what really is travel insurance. Is that what you're asking?
Speaker 1:
Yeah, there we go. That's a good way to put it. Sure, better than what I did.
Speaker 2:
So you have this is the best way to think of it you have before the trip and then you have on the trip. Before the trip, what can they do for you besides give you your money back? I mean, give you a hug and a kiss and give you your money back. Right, there really isn't. Let's say, your trip is 10 grand and, god forbid, something happens and you need your 10 grand back. That's all they can do for you before the trip, right? So that's the old called trip.
Speaker 1:
What if there's something that happens? That would be covered.
Speaker 2:
Well, you're saying what are the covered reasons, right? So every policy is different, and that's why you really got to go into the nitty gritty and that's why we talk to the people. We say what are you concerned about, like, what's your big issue here? And we hear billion things. You know well, I'm a lawyer and we're looking, working on a merger and acquisition right now and I'm a little nervous. Something's going to come down the pike and ruin my vacation, right? Is that covered? So in certain policies, yes, it's called required to work, in certain policies, no. And so the point is, these conversations are so important because then we can figure out, like, what actually is your fear? Some people have generic fears. They're like I don't know, I just want to be protected. And so we'll get you a comprehensive policy which typically would have like 30 plus covered reasons.
Speaker 2:
You know, sickness, injury, covid, accident, weather issues, airline issues, family member issues. That's a very common one with what if my kid gets sick, what if my parents get sick? You know what level of sickness? Because some of them they have to be hospitalized, some of them it could even just be a cold, and that's enough to get your money back. Right, so you need a really no, you really no intricacies. Also, what state do you live in? Different companies, all these companies have regional offices. So if you live in Texas and I live in New York, I probably wouldn't recommend the same travel insurance company because the regional office for New York is fantastic, but in the same company, the regional office for Texas is crap, and we know those guys. They're terrible to work with. And so we have it down to a really fine science at this point, like why and what we're going to recommend to people. And obviously price is going to be a factor. We're going to look at the different prices. Medically, you know you want. So let's go back to your question.
Speaker 2:
So before we have trip cancellation, once you're on the trip you have all these in-trip benefits. They're called, most notably medical coverage. So, god forbid, something happens medically on the trip, you need to go to the hospital, doctors, medications. You'll be covered for that Medical evacuation. Very serious. We just had a man three weeks ago in the Caribbean. He was 81, he had a stroke and he needed to be medically evacuated. It was over $800,000, his medical evacuation. Good thing we got him a policy that had a max of a million a person so he was covered. But if imagine he had a policy with 100,000 covered, I mean this is life-changing terrible. So I take what we do very serious because you have people's financial life at risk and their actual physical life at risk potentially.
Speaker 2:
Anyway. So you also have the medical. You have trip delay, bag delay, baggage loss. You have something called trip interruption. Like let's say your trip is interrupted, let's say you have to go back home. You know your mom is sick. You get all your money back on a prorated basis. Let's say it's $10,000. Halfway through this mom issue happens. You'll get five grand back. They will also pay your flights home and any meals and hotels and things that would be necessary. But what a big point is is that most people actually don't know what they even have.
Speaker 1:
No, no, I would bet that even a majority of I won't even say that necessarily. I would just say that there are those out there that don't even know what they're talking about, don't even know what it means when they say gee, you need travel insurance, and that's why I asked that question. There are a lot of different things that might trigger a benefit based on right see and basically exactly and but that that that's why we have the whatsapp, because that whatsapp is the lifeline in real life.
Speaker 2:
Okay, whatsapp works anywhere in the world, right r is monitored 24 hours a day and we've had. I tell people, I tell my team, you tell these people reach out, no matter what, no matter how minor, if you think it's not a big deal. You know how many times people have their bags are delayed for three hours. This happens all the time. They don't even realize. Right now, guys, you have a thousand bucks, go spend a thousand dollars. You need to spend it now, even if you get your bag in 30 minutes. Go spend a thousand bucks and you'll get it. There's so much here and to know in real life also, people are so nervous, they're scared something terrible is going on. They can't think clearly. And so to have our team in real time to give you that calmness and say, okay, here's what you need to do, blah, blah, blah, and I find that as just being like a game changer for our clients, it's huge.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, it is, and it just makes so much sense, ben, it really does. If somebody wants to get in touch with you or send their clients to you, how do we contact you? What do we do?
Speaker 2:
Well, our website is called TravelDefendcom, so very simple on that end, you can just reach out there. Our phone number, just to our main line, is 1-800-578-2871. I'm on LinkedIn, so I find that a lot of tour operators, travel agents, are on LinkedIn. That's where I really put the max of my efforts Under my LinkedIn profile. On that page is a button where you could just book an appointment with me. So if you just want to book an appointment, we can talk, cause if you call the main line it's probably not me. I don't really take so many of those calls anymore. I have a whole team that does that now, cause that's that's all. I mean those. That's the heavy lifting of what we do here. But yeah, I mean, just get in touch and we'll get you set up and we'll partner and we'll help your clients, you know.
Speaker 1:
Ben Camille on LinkedIn is a great way to go to get in touch with Ben directly. Traveldefendcom right.
Speaker 2:
That's what it is, yeah.
Speaker 1:
That's a great website to go to to find out more about Travel Defend, and it sounds like they could be a very big-time added benefit that you could offer your clientele. So a great thing, ben. Thank you so much for spending time with us today.
Speaker 2:
Awesome to be with you, man. It's great to meet you.
Speaker 1:
Outstanding and for everybody else out there. Y'all have a great day. Give us a buzz up at Travel Masters Learning Community at morrissimscom Travel Masters up in the top menu and join us and you can get a free 14-day free trial to get into the community and bounce around and see what's going on, and we'd love to have you at our next monthly workshop. Best wishes to everyone. Go out there and meet somebody new. Have a great week. We'll see you again next time right here on the Travel Masters Podcast. You.