The Pluto October update
Hi there,
The last month has been one of the busiest and most exciting months since we started Pluto. Highlights include launching our Crowdfunding campaign and gearing up for the release of our mobile app.
Crowdfunding closes in less than a week
Quite frankly, we’ve been blown away by the support towards our Seedrs campaign. Within the first five days, we flew past our initial £200k target. Within 2 weeks, we reached 200% of our target and just this week, we passed the £500k mark. Wowza.
A huge thank you to everyone that’s got involved so far — we’re delighted that you’ll soon own a part of Pluto. One of the reasons for doing a Crowdfunding campaign was to grow our community of travel lovers, and with over 750 investors so far, we feel like we’re really starting to do that.
There’s still time if you want to join our journey, but time is ticking, and we’ll be closing the campaign on Monday 14th October.
Doing things differently with our “Earth Update” campaign
The experience of travelling stirs up all sorts of emotions. Lots of good emotions, but also negative ones when things go wrong. Good travel cover can have your back when emotions are high, so the idea behind this campaign was to tap into this insight and move beyond the traditionally rational approach to advertising travel insurance.
We identified travel lovers’ desire for ‘safe uncertainty’ — the psychological need to be just outside of your comfort zone — particularly poignant in today’s unpredictable world. The campaign consists of a series of short videos, top and tailed with ‘Earth Update’ and ‘Go to Pluto’. The bit in the middle — Brexit, chicken sashimi, or monkeys stealing mobiles — reminds people that they are stepping into another world when they travel, and that travel insurance is more important than ever. As ever, we’re taking an experimental approach to running these campaigns, measuring how people are responding to the ads and refining where appropriate.
We worked with some industry experts on the campaign, which led to some great press coverage in one of the biggest media outlets within the creative industry — Campaign Magazine.
Soon to launch our mobile app…you beta believe it
We’re really close to launching the beta version of our mobile app (starting with iOS), where you’ll be able to:
- Easily access your cover and check what you’re covered for, in just a few clicks.
- Submit claims in less than 10 minutes, and track their progress.
- Get human help whenever you need it
We have lots of other exciting features that we’ll be launching soon after, including being able to chat to a UK GP, powered by Babylon, if you’re ill abroad, and a free lounge pass or cash if your flight’s delayed by more than two hours.
We’re looking for customers who would like to be the first to try out the app, providing us with your honest feedback, and letting us know what else you want. Fancy it?
In other news
Mashable created a slick video about us, the co-founders / humans behind Pluto. The video covers our ambitions, why we chose insurance (spoiler alert; because it’s actually a bit boring) and how we tackle the problem we’re solving. You can watch it in full here.
In September we welcomed more customers than ever before. We said hello to over 150 new globe trotters. This has increased 50% month on month for the last 3 months now. It’s brilliant that more and more people are relying on Pluto to take care of them abroad, and we look forward to growing this number over the coming months.
That’s about it from us this month, thanks for reading.
Safe travels!
Alex & Harry
Originally published at https://blog.pluto.travel on October 8, 2019.
