Montreal-based Hopper strikes insurance deal with Air Canada

Canadian online travel-services company Hopper is taking its business to the skies for its next stage of growth. On Wednesday, Hopper announced it signed a deal with Air Canada – its first airline partner – to offer its cancellation insurance product for non-refundable flights. It’s the latest in a slew of global deals from the rapidly growing tech startup, which have included partnerships with U.S. credit-card issuer Capital One Financial Corp. and Brazilian digital bank Nu Holdings Ltd., also known as Nubank. Hopper’s new insurance feature, dubbed “Cancel for any reason,” is available to travellers directly on Air Canada’s website. It will cost anywhere from 5 to 25% of the value of a flight, allowing customers to cancel their air travel up to 24 hours before departure and obtain a refund of 80 to 100% of the original booking. The product has been in testing by Air Canada over the past couple of months and is being used by tens of thousands of customers, Hopper said. Hopper will split the profits with Air Canada while taking full financial risk, using its technology and vast amounts of data to dynamically price the likelihood of cancellation for individual consumers based on factors such as time of booking and route chosen. “This is the start of a new market for Hopper,” president and co-founder Dakota Smith said. The company has four other partnerships with airlines in the works, which it says it expects to announce before the end of the year and the holiday season’s travel chaos. The Air Canada deal comes just weeks after travel agency Expedia terminated its five-year partnership with Hopper as a lodging-inventory supplier, as was first reported by Skift, a travel news outlet.<br/>