Louise Birritteri: Beyond embedded insurance – how one MGA is seeking to build ‘insurance enabled business models’

To truly improve the customer experience of purchasing embedded insurance in the short-term rental market, while also simultaneously unlocking new revenue streams, property managers should consider adopting a new approach – “insurance enabled business models”.

This is according to Louise Birritteri, chief executive at MGA Pikl, who spoke exclusively to Insurance Times at the Insurtech Insights 2026 conference, held on 18 and 19 March 2026 in London.

Pikl’s journey to its current product offering was not direct.

In fact, it took the global Covid-19 pandemic to really highlight a major rental industry pain point that the MGA could address, leading to the conception of a novel business model which Birritteri hoped would mitigate market friction.

“We started off in 2019 in the vacation rental market, helping homeowners that couldn’t get insurance when they were doing Airbnb,” Birritteri explains.

“But not long after we launched, in 2020, the pandemic kicked in. That was obviously very impactful for our market, but what it showed us was that there was an opportunity in the cancellations space.

“At that time, during [the Covid-19 pandemic], the professional property managers in that market were really struggling because they were having to offer flexible policies because of pandemic lockdowns and that was costing them a lot of money.”

This identification of certain pain points surrounding short-term rental cancellations prompted Pikl to pivot its business plan towards a business-to-business (B2B) offering in 2022.

But this pivot was not just centred on a differing customer base. Pikl, inspired by the operating models of luxury hotels and the hidden insurance infrastructure sometimes seen in retail and e-commerce purchases, decided to introduce an entirely new business model to the rentals market.

The nuts and bolts

So, how does Pikl’s self-coined “insurance enabled business models” offering work?

To understand this, it is first worth looking at what Birritteri feels are the shortcomings of the product’s spiritual predecessor – embedded insurance.

In traditional embedded insurance propositions, a customer is presented with the opportunity to buy an insurance policy during their usual retail checkout processes. For example, purchasing travel cover when booking a holiday, or gadget insurance when buying a new mobile phone.

Birritteri has previously spoken out about the deficiencies of such processes in relation to travel insurance.

In her view, buying travel cover at the same time as making a flight or hotel booking might outwardly seem like innovation, but at the crunch point of a customer having to make a claim, their experience is still often hampered by medical screenings, policy exclusions and labyrinthine third party claims processes.

To combat this, Pikl offers a selection of more expensive and flexible policies which are paid for and held by the booking platform or property manager – rather than a guest securing their own cover and becoming a policyholder.

This means that the handling of claims related to events like cancellations and damages is never seen by the guest – but they still retain the benefits of this type of protection.

This approach also gives booking sites and property managers flexibility in how they apply the cover, either choosing to allow guests to opt in to flexible bookings for a fee, or deploying the cover as a cancellation guarantee across all bookings.

In the case of damage cover, businesses can choose to issue customers a small, non-refundable fee, removing the requirement for guests to pay a larger, refundable damage deposit.

Pikl says this “flips what can be a negative experience into one which reduces friction for both guests and owners, [while] reducing administration and creating a new revenue stream”.

The real world impact

With any innovative idea, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. How successful, then, has Pikl’s pivot been?

In 2024, Pikl announced a partnership with its biggest customer to date, holiday rentals company Sykes Cottages, a firm which manages over 22,500 holiday properties across the UK and Ireland.

Then, in March 2026, Pikl said it had achieved a 20% market share in the UK short-term rental market and that its data across some eight million bookings showed that guests were willing to pay 24% more for flexible booking options.

The MGA added that its flagship flexible cancellation product had “led to 2.1x revenue growth for launch partners, which has in turn accelerated market demand and roll out”.

These statistics make for impressive reading and Birritteri believes the key to Pikl’s success so far is not by adding an embedded insurance policy as a revenue stream, but by using the insurance cover to drive more business.

Firms can charge more for flexible bookings, they can reduce the risk of leaving rooms unsold and – crucially according to Birritteri – change cancellations from a pain point to a revenue producing inconvenience.

“We double their overall revenue by re-engineering that business model,” Birritteri concludes.

“It’s supported by the underlying insurance, so we believe we’ve created a new category of insurance, which we’re calling ‘insurance enabled business models’.

“We’re not embedding anything in a journey. The last 10 years would have been ‘let’s put some travel insurance or cancellation insurance into a journey’.

“But we’ve reimagined fundamentally how the business model can work for that partner, supported by insurance.”