CLIENT: Premium international travel insurance brand with gamified loyalty programme
GEOGRAPHY: Singapore, Southeast Asia, Australia, UK
AUDIENCE: Frequent travellers 28 to 45 who are not impressed by loyalty programmes and have earned the right not to be. They buy travel insurance because they have to, not because anyone has ever made them feel good about it. They are competitive by nature, achievers by habit, and deeply allergic to being patronised by a programme that mistakes spending thresholds for motivation.
PURPOSE: Reposition travel insurance from a grudge purchase into an active, gamified loyalty experience with milestones that feel genuinely worth chasing.
BRIEF: Nobody has ever been excited about buying travel insurance. It is the most functional of all financial products, purchased with mild resentment, forgotten immediately, remembered only when something goes wrong. The brief was to change that relationship entirely by building a loyalty mechanic around the one thing frequent travellers actually are: competitive. Not “you’ve earned coverage” but “you’re two trips from Elite status and here’s what that gets you.” The difference sounds small. The difference is everything.
TONE: Direct. Competitive. Slightly irreverent about the category it lives in. Talks to the customer like they’re smart, because they are, and they’ve been sold boring insurance communications their entire adult life.
MY ROLE: Campaign concept, tagline, OOH and digital copy, in-app messaging, email campaign, gamification copy framework.
FORMAT: OOH / Digital / In-App / Email / Gamification Framework
Nobody talks about their travel insurance. Nobody. You could survey every frequent traveller in Changi Terminal 3 right now and not one of them would bring it up unprompted. They bought it. It exists somewhere in their email. They will find it if they need it and they are actively hoping they will not need it.
This is the category’s fundamental problem and also, it turned out, its greatest creative opportunity.
Insurance loyalty programmes exist but they are universally built around the wrong mechanic. Spend more, earn more. Which means the more things go wrong on your trips, the more you’re spending, the more you theoretically earn. This is not motivating. This is just math with extra steps.
The brief became: what if the programme rewarded you for something you’re actually doing anyway, which is travelling, frequently, to more places, with more confidence, because that is who this person is? What if the milestone wasn’t a spending threshold but a real achievement? Ten countries covered. Three consecutive claim-free years. First solo trip. First business class upgrade covered. Milestones that mean something to the person who reached them.
That person is extremely online and extremely competitive. They have completed every ring on their Apple Watch for 200 consecutive days. They know their Duolingo streak to the day. They are not motivated by a points balance. They are motivated by a gap. A specific, closeable, achievable gap between where they are and something worth having.
The campaign grew entirely from that gap. Every piece of copy was written around the milestone, not the transaction. The win, not the purchase.
The campaign runs on one mechanic across every format: show the gap, not the balance. The gap is motivating. The balance is just a number.
In-app messaging: “Two trips from Elite. Your next adventure gets you there.” “Three claim-free years. That’s not luck. That’s you travelling well.” “Elite status unlocked. You were always going to get here.”
OOH: “The insurance you’ll actually think about. Novel concept, we know.” “Not a spending target. An achievement. There’s a difference.” “Most insurance rewards you for things going wrong. This one rewards you for getting it right.”
Email subject lines: “You’re closer than you think.” “Gap: two trips. Time to close it.” “Elite status is one adventure away. Here’s what that looks like.”
Gamification copy framework: Every milestone has a name, not a number. Not “ten trips covered” but “The One Who Always Comes Back.” Not “tier three status” but “Unbothered At Every Border.” The language of the programme rewards identity, not arithmetic.
Push notifications: “Your streak is alive. Keep going.” “Two trips from Elite. You’ve done harder things.” “The status is yours. You just have to show up.”
Social captions: “Most people buy travel insurance and forget about it immediately. Some people collect status. You know which one you are.” “The gap is two trips. The destination is entirely up to you.” “Insurance was never meant to be exciting. We disagreed.”
End card. Brand name. The points you’ll actually care about. Even Tom Hanks in The Terminal would have had Elite status by now.
