A small icon at checkout could make travel insurance fairer — without rewriting a single regulation.
Every time you book a flight, somewhere between entering your card details and clicking confirm, a travel insurance offer appears. It feels like an add-on. It behaves like an add-on. But legally, it isn’t one — and that loophole is costing consumers.
Australia’s Deferred Sales Model (DSM) was a genuine win. Introduced in 2021, it forces a four-day pause between buying a product and being offered add-on insurance — slow the decision down, reduce the pressure, give people space to think. It worked.
But here’s the catch. The DSM applies when the seller of the main product also sells the insurance. Airlines don’t sell travel insurance — insurers do, through embedded checkout partnerships. So legally, the pressure, the ambiguity, and the timing are completely untouched. You’re still exhausted from a long booking process, staring at a $15 add-on next to a $900 flight, making a decision based on almost no real information.
The problem isn’t the price. It’s the missing data.
When you’re deciding whether to buy travel insurance mid-booking, you’re making a bet on an unknown. You have no idea how often that specific route gets cancelled. You don’t know how reliably that airline operates that particular path. So your brain fills the gap — with the last disrupted trip you remember, with worst-case imagination, with the reasoning that $15 feels trivial next to $900 so why not.
This is ambiguity aversion. When the probability of something going wrong is unknown, we tend to assume the worst and over-insure. It’s a completely predictable response to an information vacuum. And both airlines and insurers benefit from keeping that vacuum intact. Airlines avoid scrutiny of their on-time performance and cancellation rates. Insurers enjoy higher uptake on products priced for fear rather than actual risk. The mutual silence is profitable for both.
Enter FlyWise.
FlyWise is a route-reliability icon placed directly beside the insurance offer at checkout. It draws on rolling 12-month data — cancellations, significant delays, passenger rebooking — aggregated at the specific route and airline level. The icon is simple: green means this route and airline have a strong on-time record, yellow means moderate disruption history, red means this route has a higher pattern of cancellations or delays.
Alongside the icon, a single line: “Based on this route and airline’s performance over the past 12 months.”
That’s the whole intervention.
It doesn’t tell you what to buy. It doesn’t set prices or make predictions about your specific flight. It simply makes one piece of currently hidden information visible at exactly the moment you’re deciding — turning vague, fear-driven risk into something you can actually reason about. A traveller looking at a green icon on a well-established domestic route is making a genuinely different decision than one staring at a red icon on an airline with a poor cancellation record. Right now, both are making the same decision in the dark.
Why standard disclosure misses the point
You might think: just require airlines to publish reliability data. But general disclosure doesn’t work when people are fatigued, mid-transaction, and under time pressure. Pointing someone to a Product Disclosure Statement at checkout is like handing them a manual while they’re already moving.
FlyWise works because it’s specific, it’s timely, and it requires zero extra effort from the consumer. It also creates a quiet pressure on insurers — when route-level risk becomes visible, pricing products as if every route carries the same risk becomes much harder to justify. Better pricing follows naturally, through market logic rather than regulatory force.
The current system isn’t broken because travellers are careless. It’s broken because the information environment was built to keep them guessing. FlyWise just puts one honest number in the room.
References: ASIC (2021); Gabaix & Laibson (2006); Bertrand & Morse (2011); Mullainathan & Shafir (2013)
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