Worried That Rain, Heat Or Dust Storms Will Ruin Your Next Vacation? This Climate Scientist Wants To Offer A New Type Of Protection

Even if you’re not at Burning Man, wondering if dust storms or rain will strike again, chances are you’ve wondered if bad weather would affect a vacation or day trip you planned.

Climate scientist Nick Cavanaugh wants to offer a remedy as CEO of Sensible Weather, a Los Angeles startup he founded in July 2019. It provides travel protection for trips and outdoor experiences, automatically reimbursing purchasers if weather-related events disrupt their plans.

Sensible Weather doesn’t sell insurance. Instead, it provides guaranteed reimbursement if travelers experience common weather-related disruptions of their trips, such as rain, extreme temperatures and high winds.

Using location-specific data, Sensible Weather determines the factors most likely to ruin a trip booked at a particular location on a specific date and offers automatic reimbursement if these occur. Reimbursements fall within thresholds the company sets in advance, specifying the number of hours of bad weather that must occur to qualify and the financial compensation to which a purchaser is entitled.

The policies are priced dynamically, based on the odds of inclement weather occurring at the location travelers are visiting on a specific date. Polices are built around a “time deductible”— “basically, how long during the period you care about is the weather bad,” Cavanaugh explains.

“We only have so much time to enjoy ourselves—to go on vacation, to take our kids to Disneyland, or on a bucket list trip,” he says. “We’re building a product that protects time.”

As with travel insurance, consumers purchase Sensible Weather’s product via the websites of its partners, such as hotels and resorts, which receive a revenue share. Sensible Weather announced a partnership with Inntopia, a creator of booking engines for resorts, in February 2025.

Sensible Weather, which has approximately 25 employees, brings in annual revenue in the $5 million to $10 million range, according to Cavanaugh. It has raised about $31 million in venture capital from investors such as Amex Ventures and Infinity Ventures, according to Cavanaugh, and has received funding from the National Science Foundation and EP Golf Ventures.

Sensible Weather’s main competitors come from the travel and ticket insurance sector—a highly competitive arena. The global travel insurance market is projected to expand from $27 billion in 2024 to nearly $64 billion by 2030, with a compound annual growth rate of 15.4% from 2025 to 2030, according to Grand View Research. Europe, where Sensible Weather is expanding, dominates the travel insurance market. Internationally, single-trip travel insurance accounting for 64% of the market in 2024.

“Even though travel insurance and a weather guarantee are different products, we do compete for integrations, and we do compete for real estate on an e-commerce website,” says Cavanaugh.

However, travel and ticket insurance typically do not cover purchases such as ski lift tickets or bookings at a campground or golf course. Sensible Weather is targeting those gaps in the marketplace, he says.

So far, about 90% of the trips for which Sensible Weather has made reimbursements were disrupted by rain, Cavanaugh says. “That could be getting rained on while they’re golfing, at a theme park or on a beach vacation in Hawaii.”

However, it has covered other types of disruptions, he says: “It can be too hot, too cold or too windy,” he says. “There can be too much snow, or too little snow.”

The company is able to make money even when paying these reimbursements because extreme weather doesn’t usually strike everywhere at once, he says. “The goal is to sell all over the place, all different times of year,” says Cavanaugh. “It can’t rain everywhere at once.”

Outdoor life sparks a passion for better on weather

Cavanaugh says he has been interested in weather since he was a child. He grew up outside of Seattle, enjoying boating, fishing, and wakeboarding in the summer, and skiing in the winter.

He went on to study engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. He earned a master’s degree in climate sciences at the University of California, San Diego, and conducted postdoctoral work at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where he studied climate risk—essentially a combination of weather variability, weather predictability, and climate change, as he describes it.

“My entire life, I’ve been fascinated by weather and figuring out the odds of weather—and that could be the odds of weather tomorrow, next year or 100 years from now,” he says.

Cavanaugh left academia for the hedge fund world in 2016 and joined Cumulus (acquired by the investment firm Citadel) in New York City as a weather data scientist, later becoming an energy analyst.

A new, data-driven business model

Sensible Weather partners with reinsurers to back its risk, like traditional insurance companies. However, a conventional insurance policy relies on adjusters to assess damage and determine the cost of addressing it, potentially incurring legal expenses if a policyholder challenges the assessment, Cavanaugh explains.

Sensible Weather, in contrast, is entirely data-driven, he says. “A computer runs numbers,” says Cavanaugh. “If it rains for more than three hours during a day, there’s an automated trigger that sends a consumer a text message. And it says, ‘We know you’re at this theme park on this day, and we know that it rained more than we guaranteed you. Click here and get your money.”Consumers who click can opt to have the money sent to their bank account or PayPal.

Given this level of automation, he says, “the marginal cost of supporting these policies is zero.”

Cavanaugh believes that a large portion of the insurance market has the potential to become data-driven in the same way, though protecting trips against weather-related disruptions is easier than applying a similar approach to health insurance.

“Weather is unique in that there’s lots and lots of data,” he says. “But as we go into the future, and there are more and more sensors and more and more data, there’s no reason that insurance can’t be automated.”

The big question for both businesses and consumers is what the world will be like in the next few decades, given the state of the climate, says Cavanaugh.

“I think about that a lot,” he says. “I don’t have the answer. However, I do think that people need to continue traveling and experiencing new things. So, what we try to do is encourage that in a computational way that is agnostic , so we can protect what you’re doing, and you can try it. And if the weather doesn’t cooperate, we’ll pay you back.”