India’s invisible travel insurance market
Travel insurance in India is growing at roughly 10% a year. If the market is growing, why are people still not buying?
Fifty travellers. Seventy-four trips. Two payouts. One flew Bengaluru across Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and Australia; the other flew Ahmedabad to Japan. The red arcs are not the failures on this map — they are the only two people the product ever reached.
Primary survey, n = 50, July 2026 · Existing Service Design analysis: HDFC ERGO
Click either red arc — Ahmedabad → Japan, or the Bengaluru multi-country run — to open the two boarding passes behind them.
Looking at the same respondents, the difference becomes even clearer. For international travel, nearly 68% travelled with insurance. For domestic travel, only 38% ended up insured. But the bigger difference was not the percentage. It was the intention.
International · manifest
10 of 19, by reasons selected, did not cite a visa or destination mandate — 52.6% bought it voluntarily. The other 9 named a visa mandate.
Where they bought it: travel or visa agent 6 · booking site or airline 6 · insurer’s own site or app 4 · aggregator such as Policybazaar 3.
Crossing a border is what turns insurance from an accident into a decision.
Domestic · manifest
5 said yes, 3 were unsure, 13 did not — at most 8 of 21 carried cover. All 8 who described why say it was auto-added at checkout and they kept it — the ₹1 add-on. Every one bought through a booking site, airline, or a train and bus app such as IRCTC or redBus; nobody went to an insurer, and only 2 gave any reason beyond the auto-add.
Domestically, nobody chose insurance. It was chosen for them at checkout, for a rupee. n = 8 · small base, indicative only
Twenty-seven of these trips carried a policy. Whose policy, though — could anyone say?
That simple question revealed something unexpected. Two columns carry the whole argument. Almost as many travellers could not recall their insurer at all as named the most-recalled brand in the country. And HDFC ERGO never leaves the ground — named by nobody, in a question that printed its name as the worked example.
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| Insurer | Travellers | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Tata AIGhedged | 5 | Most-named brand |
| ICICI Lombard | 4 | — |
| Ackohedged | 3 | Digital-first insurer |
| Bajaj Allianz | 2 | — |
| Reliance Generalhedged | 2 | — |
| Care Health | 1 | — |
| Asegohedged | 1 | Travel-assistance specialist |
| New India Assurance | 1 | — |
| Royal Sundaram | 1 | — |
| United India | 1 | — |
| Patriothedged | 1 | US-domiciled plan |
| Tin Leghedged | 1 | US-domiciled plan |
| HDFC ERGO | 0 | Named by no one |
| Cannot recall | 9 | Insurer unknown to the traveller |
Every traveller in the research resolves to one of seven archetypes, and each is issued its own passport. As we interviewed travellers, we realised something important. There wasn't one kind of insurance buyer. There were many. Some wanted an agent to decide for them. Some compared every policy online. Some bought only because immigration required it. Some cared only about fast claims. The same insurance service was being used in completely different ways. Instead of studying one customer journey, we mapped user archetypes. Because different people were actually using different versions of the same service.
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Click the right page to turn →
Once we understood the people, we turned towards the service itself. Travel insurance looks like a single product. It isn't. It is actually many services working together. A financial service. A digital platform. A documentation service. A customer support service. A claims network. A regulatory service. We studied the service from two different lenses. One looked at what the service is. The other looked at how every feature affects the traveller's journey.
Travel insurance is not one kind of service but many at once. Each sheet in the folder is one standard framework applied to the same product — pull a sheet out to read it.
What kind of service is this
The services marketing triangle
Who receives the service
What is being processed
Nature of the relationship
Instead of asking what insurance does — ask what job the customer is hiring this service for.
Click a sheet to pull it out · esc or the backdrop puts it back
HDFC ERGO’s eight service features run down the left; the traveller’s 18-step critical path runs across the top. Hover a mark to read it, click one to hold the highlight. Every negative mark falls after the incident — in the half of the product almost none of our respondents ever reached.
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hover to read · click to highlight
Five things the product promises, and the six impressions travellers actually come away with. The two halves are cut from the same service — watch them try to meet.
Where trust meets the real experience
The same need — cover for a trip — taken three ways. To understand these moments beyond documents, we experienced the journey ourselves.
The same friction appeared again and again. Every transition increased effort. Not because the policy failed. Because the service around the policy became difficult to navigate.
scroll sideways to walk the journey →
The next phase waits in the dark — click the dimmed platforms (or “Reveal phase”) to walk forward. Click any ringed step — red for a service failure, blue for a pain point, green for design intent — and its note opens right there on the board.
Click an agent to light up every step where the traveller meets them — the board above scrolls to the first, revealing later phases if it must. Click again to clear.
| Moment | Ideal | App | Branch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seeing a price | Before any personal data | After a phone number | After a queue and ~40 minutes |
| Identity asked for | Once | Three times — form, OTP, eKYC | Out loud, across a counter |
| Comparing options | Built into the flow | Compare screen exists | Costs a second physical journey |
| Reading the wording | At purchase | After the incident | Never — the paper is at home |
| Notifying the insurer | One number, works abroad | Number sits inside an unopened PDF | Traveller picks the order, unscripted |
| Document list | Issued at intimation | Discovered by reading the policy | Arrives late and grows |
| While it is assessed | Status, date, named owner | No timeline, no tracking | No timeline, no tracking |
| If it is rejected | Escalation with reasons | Map stops — no return path | Loops back to compiling proof |
| Return paths drawn | 1 — renewal re-enters the cycle | 0 | 3 — requeue, recompile, renewal |
Where they fail identically
Notification at the incident is unscripted in both real journeys. The document list is revealed late and grows in both. Evaluation is silent in both. Rejection loops backwards to the customer instead of forwards to a decision.
Where they diverge
The app loses people at the front door, before a product is ever seen. The branch loses them at the quotation, after forty minutes of effort. Same drop-out, opposite cost.
Three highest-leverage moves
Quote before identity removes the app's front-door exit and gives the branch something to hand over. One document list at intimation kills the rework loop both share. A claim status with a date is the cheapest fix on the board.
The same service, pulled apart by who is in the room. Above the line sit the people the product is for. Looking beyond HDFC ERGO, another pattern emerged. The journey is never controlled by one organisation. Travel agents. Banks. Insurance companies. Third-party administrators. Hospitals. Embassies. Assessors. Payment systems. Regulators. Every one of them owns only a small part of the experience. The only person who moves through every stage is the traveller.
The traveller is the only actor present in all four stages. Everyone else enters, acts and exits. Reveal the stages one at a time and watch the cast turn over around a person who never gets to hand the problem to anybody. The three cream nodes in the necks are the inflections — the moments the service changes hands, and the moments it drops things.
scroll sideways to read the whole landscape →
What the map makes obvious
Stage 01 is crowded — four supporting organisations, three user types, two internal teams, all competing to own the sale. By stage 02 the traveller is alone abroad with a single assistance desk between them and a foreign hospital.
The weakest seam
The second inflection — return home. Evidence gathered abroad under stress has to satisfy documentation rules the traveller has never read. Nobody on either side of that seam owns the handover.
Where the deck lands
Read it against section 05: the board shows what the traveller does, this map shows who is standing there when they do it. Every failure on the board sits on a seam here.
Reading the map — the traveller is the only actor present in all four stages; every other party enters, acts and exits. Stages unlock in order; press Reset to walk it again.
Travel insurance is often sold as a financial product. Our research suggests otherwise. It is a coordination service. The policy is only one small piece. The real experience is created by every conversation, every document, every handoff and every decision that follows. HDFC ERGO did not become interesting because it had the biggest market share. It became interesting because one of India's largest insurers could almost disappear from the customer's memory. And that raises a bigger question. If people only remember insurance when something goes wrong, then the service isn't defined by the policy they buy. It is defined by the experience they live through when they finally need it.
Primary survey of 50 respondents, June 2026. Recruited through the researchers' own networks — heavily weighted to Bengaluru, Gujarat and a handful of US cities, and to respondents under 32 (39 of 50). Not a representative sample of Indian travellers. Claim-stage figures rest on six to seven responses and are indicative only. The survey cannot distinguish a rejected claim from a claim never filed. Review-corpus figures are directional, drawn from self-selected public reviews of general insurance products across multiple brands; sentiment from a multilingual transformer model that agreed with star ratings 90.3% of the time, against 28.6% for a lexicon baseline. Secondary-research figures are cited to their sources inline.
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