Costco Travel Insurance: from call-center dependency to 24/7 digital distribution
Led a six-month partner-grade launch spanning customer journey, insurance rules, membership verification, APIs, compliance, analytics, UAT, and operational readiness.
- My role
- Product lead for white-label journey, requirements, prioritization, UAT, and release readiness
- Timeframe
- Six-month MVP delivery
- Evidence boundary
- $23M+ is realized first-year sales. Approximately $54M is the 2026 forecast.
The business problem
Costco and Travelex needed to replace a primarily weekday, call-center-driven purchase model with a digital journey that customers could use at any time. The visible output was a website; the actual product crossed membership controls, quote and plan rules, traveler enrollment, payment, policy issuance, analytics, CRM, support, and release operations.
My product approach
I reduced “build the Costco Travel white-label site” into two connected decisions: the customer journey in front and the authoritative insurance data flow behind it. I mapped the journey, partner constraints, regulated decision points, data exchanges, failure states, and service handoffs. I translated that map into product requirements, validation rules, analytics events, acceptance criteria, UAT scenarios, and release gates.
Decisions that mattered
- Launch without waiting for ideal SSO. I separated the non-negotiable requirement—verified membership—from the implementation preference, then recommended the available membership API with monitoring, clearer errors, and a measured path to reduce friction.
- Treat support as part of the product. Error recovery, CRM, customer service, and operational readiness were included in scope rather than left for after launch.
- Make ownership visible. Costco, Product, Engineering, Underwriting, Compliance, Payments, QA, Analytics, and Operations worked through shared dependencies, named decisions, and launch gates.
Outcome
The product launched in six months and created a scalable 24/7 partner distribution channel. It generated more than $23M in first-year sales. The approximately $54M figure is a 2026 forecast, not a realized result.
What I learned
Partner product ownership means owning the connections between teams, systems, data, and operating handoffs. Next time, I would lock data-contract ownership and platform baselines even earlier.