Travelers Insurance is owned by its shareholders, as it is a publicly traded company without a parent company. Geico, on the other hand, is an independent company owned by Berkshire Hathaway. The Travelers Companies, Inc. was founded on March 5, 1853 in St.
Paul, Minnesota, and was originally known as Saint Paul Fire and Marine Insurance Co. It was created to serve local customers instead of waiting for claims to be paid by East Coast insurance companies. During the 19th century, the company barely survived the panic of 1857 by drastically reducing its operations and reorganizing itself into a limited liability company. It then expanded its operations across the country.
Throughout the 20th century, Travelers was responsible for many innovations in the insurance industry, such as the first automobile policy (1899), the first air travel policy (1911) and the first space travel policy (late 1960s, for Apollo astronauts). In 1954, it established the world's first privately owned meteorological research center, the Travelers Weather Research Center, which was the first organization to make weather forecasts using odds (a 20% chance of rain). In the early 1990s, Travelers was mainly a general property and casualty insurer, with some parallel travel insurance. In February 1994, it sold its travel insurance business to a retiring Travelers executive and it is now known as Travel Insured International, a Crum and Forster company. Many of Travelers's predecessor companies still exist today and continue to write policies and accept claims under their own names (under the general brand Travelers).
As is customary with most insurers in the United States, Travelers never dissolved the various companies it acquired but simply converted them into wholly-owned subsidiaries and trained its employees to act on behalf of those subsidiaries. This is a common risk management strategy used by U. S. insurers. If any company in the group receives too many complaints, that company can easily control the situation (which is placed in the second round and allowed to execute its policies until their completion), while the rest of the group continues to operate normally.
Charles Brunelle was one of Hartford's largest advertising agencies in the late 1960s; Hartford is known as the insurance capital of the world, or Hollywood of insurance or filing cabinet of America due to its numerous insurance companies. Travelers offers commercial and personal property and accident insurance products and services to businesses, government units, associations and individuals. Batterson, a stone contractor who first learned about passenger accident insurance (i.e., travel insurance) in 1864.
