Compare Your Travel Insurance Review: 26 Insurers, One Gibraltar Licence

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Compare Your Travel Insurance names 26 insurers on its panel, advertises over 200 prices from them, and its own medical page quotes single-trip cover from £8.23. Panel, prices and documents checked 17 September 2026 against the company's own pages. Its FAQ sets one rule most comparison sites leave unwritten: “Only travel insurance providers that are authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority are allowed on our panel.”

The names on it are recognisable — Admiral, Ageas, ERGO, Post Office Money, RAC, Rias, Sainsbury's Bank, Virgin Money, Coverwise, Esure — sitting alongside medical specialists such as Free Spirit, Good to Go and Travel Insurance 4 Medical. There is no upper age limit on who may ask for a quote, single trips run to 94 days, and gadget, winter sports and cruise cover are switches on the same form rather than separate journeys. You pay the site nothing; the insurer you choose pays it a percentage of your premium.

The firm behind all of it is Aequotech Limited, a Gibraltar company (number 111831) licensed by the Gibraltar Financial Services Commission under licence 20376 and appearing on the UK register under firm reference 677661. It trades under five names, and one of them — Medical Travel Compared — is a specialist version of this same panel. That matters more than it sounds, and both halves of it are set out further down.

What the panel's medical limits actually run to

A comparison page is only as good as the numbers it puts side by side, so here are two panel members' published tables rather than a summary of them. Post Office sells three levels: Economy carries £5 million of emergency medical cover with a £125 excess, £1,000 of cancellation and £1,500 of baggage; Standard lifts medical to £10 million, drops the excess to £99 and raises cancellation to £3,000; Premier reaches £15 million on a £50 excess, with £5,000 of cancellation, £3,000 of baggage and £500 of money, rising to £750 if the currency came from a Post Office branch. Missed departure is absent from Economy, worth £750 on Standard and £1,500 on Premier.

Admiral, underwritten by EUI Limited (company 02686904, firm reference 309378), starts where Post Office finishes. Its base policy pays £10 million of emergency medical on a £100 excess, Gold pays £15 million on £75, and Platinum pays £20 million on £50, with cancellation climbing £1,500, £3,000, £5,000 and baggage £1,000, £2,000, £3,000 alongside it.

So the range this one form reaches across is roughly £5 million to £20 million of medical cover and £125 down to £50 of excess — a fourfold spread on the limit and a two-and-a-half-fold spread on what you pay before the insurer does. Two quotes eleven pence apart can sit either side of that. The form asks your destination early because it is the one answer that moves the medical limit you should be aiming for: a broken hip in Spain and the same break in Florida are not the same bill.

The Association of British Insurers puts a floor under how often this matters. UK travel insurers paid £472 million across more than 500,000 claims in 2024. Medical expenses were the single most common reason to claim at 34% of the total, worth £262 million between them, and one insurer alone settled a claim of over £1 million for emergency hospital treatment in the United States and a flight home.

A Gibraltar licence, a Surrey postbox and the question in between

The insurers on the panel must be FCA-authorised. The company running the panel is licensed somewhere else. Aequotech Limited holds permission from the Gibraltar Financial Services Commission under Gibraltar's own Financial Services Act 2019 for “taking up or pursuing insurance distribution – general”, and the firm's terms say it works into Britain “on a freedom of services basis” — selling from Gibraltar rather than from a UK office.

The FCA publishes a consumer page on exactly this arrangement, last updated 2 September 2026. It distinguishes a branch passport, meaning a physical UK presence, from a services passport, meaning none; and it says plainly that such firms “won't have been assessed or authorised by us or the Prudential Regulation Authority”. On complaints it is narrower still: where there is no UK branch, “you'll generally only be able to complain to the Financial Ombudsman if the firm has joined its voluntary jurisdiction.”

Compare Your Travel Insurance's own complaints page offers the Ombudsman without qualification — Exchange Tower, London E14 9SR, 0800 023 4567, available “if we do not provide a final response within 8 weeks” — and mentions no Gibraltar scheme at all. Complaints are posted to a UK address, PO Box 125, Hindhead, GU27 9HQ. Whether that adds up to a UK branch for Ombudsman purposes, or to voluntary-jurisdiction membership, is not something either the firm's pages or the FCA's answer for you, and it is a fair thing to ask by email before you buy. In practice it bites rarely: a complaint about the policy goes to the insurer, who is FCA-authorised and firmly inside the Ombudsman's compulsory jurisdiction. It is a complaint about the comparison itself — a price that changed between quote and checkout, a filter that hid a policy — where the answer matters.

There is a clock on the arrangement, too. Gibraltar firms reach the UK market through transitional provisions kept alive year by year while the permanent Gibraltar Authorisation Regime in the Financial Services Act 2021 is brought into operation. The most recent extension, the Financial Services (Gibraltar) (Amendment) (EU Exit) Regulations 2025, was made on 11 November 2025, came into force on 16 December 2025 and runs the current arrangements to 31 December 2026. Nothing about that threatens a policy you bought through the site — your contract is with the insurer — but it is why the regulatory wording on this site will probably be different a year from now.

One licence, five shopfronts, and the one you may actually want

The Gibraltar register lists five trading names against licence 20376: Compare Your Travel Insurance, Compare Your Cruise Insurance, Medical Travel Compared, Juxtify and Signposter Plus. It also records two former company names, CYTI (Gibraltar) Limited and Medical Travel Compared Limited, which is a useful clue about where the business started: the quote journey at quote.compareyourtravelinsurance.co.uk still identifies itself internally as CYTI.

The practical point is the sister site. Medical Travel Compared runs the same commission model from the same licence, and works with “over 30 specialist providers”, naming 33 of them — several of which, including Free Spirit, Good to Go and Travel Insurance 4 Medical, exist mainly to quote on conditions a mainstream insurer prices out of reach. If you are shopping with a heart condition, a cancer history or anything recently investigated, that is the panel to be on, and it belongs to the same company. Neither the medical-conditions page nor the FAQ on this site tells you it exists.

Two UK companies carrying the CYTI name also sat on the Companies House register until this year. CYTI Limited (number 07368288), incorporated on 7 September 2010 at 1 Dean Street, London, registered under the codes for non-life insurance and information technology services, and CYTI (Holdings) Limited (11080164, incorporated 23 November 2017, filing as dormant) were both dissolved on 24 March 2026. Public records do not state that either belonged to this group, and the site names no UK company anywhere, so treat the connection as unconfirmed — but it is the reason the only British address left in the chain is a postbox in Surrey.

The medical questions are the ones that decide a claim

The site is straight about declaration, and the wording deserves quoting because it is the sentence most travellers skim: “If you need to make a claim and your insurer discovers you did not disclose your medical history fully, they may deem your policy invalid.” Its FAQ adds two conditions people miss — cover applies only to conditions “you've declared and the insurer has accepted in writing”, and a condition that has not been diagnosed yet is not covered at all, however plainly it was brewing.

The Ombudsman's caseload says the same thing from the other end. Travel insurance complaints reached 4,466 in the year to 31 March 2024, up 19% on 3,745 the year before and well clear of the 2,510 recorded in 2019/20. Declined claims lead the list, and undisclosed or under-disclosed medical history leads the declines. The Ombudsman's own advice is blunter than any insurer's: you may have to declare a condition “even if you have fully recovered”.

Where this site falls short is the step the regulator built for precisely this reader. Since 26 April 2021, under policy statement PS20/3, firms selling retail travel insurance — intermediaries and comparison sites included — must point customers with serious pre-existing conditions towards a directory of specialist firms, of which two qualify: MoneyHelper's and BIBA's. The rules were tightened again from 1 January 2026: the premium level that triggers signposting rose from £100 to £200, it will be revised against the Consumer Prices Index every 5 years, and each firm may now hold only one entry per directory. The FCA's own review of the regime estimated it had produced about 21,000 additional policy sales.

Compare Your Travel Insurance's page on pre-existing medical conditions carries no link to either directory, and no directory link appears in its FAQ. The page instead describes medical screening as “a friendly chat about your health history”. That is a fair description of the questionnaire, and a thin substitute for a signpost — particularly from a firm that already owns a specialist panel it could send you to.

Where the website stops short of finishing itself

Small things, individually forgivable, and worth knowing before you judge the brand by its polish.

The Meet the Team page carries six profiles. One, Tommy Lloyd, has a photograph and a line of biography claiming 15 years in insurance. The other five have no photographs and placeholder Latin where the biography should be, under the names Daryl Dixon, Maggie Greene, Morgan Jones, Eugene Porter and Alicia Clark — a cast list borrowed from a television drama and never replaced.

Two different registered addresses are in circulation for the same company. The site's terms and privacy policy give PO Box 475, Suite 23 Portland House, Glacis Road, Gibraltar GX11 1AA; the Gibraltar regulator's register gives Unit 104, Royal Ocean Plaza, Ocean Village, at the same postcode. The about page dates the business to 2013 while the register dates the company to 18 July 2014. A /providers/ page returns a 404, so the panel list survives only on the about page. And the privacy policy names 18 firms that receive your data against the 26 shown as panel members, without explaining the gap.

None of that changes a quote. It does tell you how much of the site is maintained, which is worth a moment's thought before you hand over a date of birth and a medical history.

Money, timing and the two things to check at checkout

The service is free to use and paid by the insurer: “that provider gives us a small percentage of the policy cost. This is our commission.” The size of the percentage is not published, and the firm says it does not affect the order results appear in. Prices are described as live and set by the provider, so the same search an hour later can return a different number, and there are no site-only discounts to hunt for.

Every policy bought through the panel carries a 14-day right to cancel. Two checks are worth making inside those 14 days rather than at an airport. First, buy cancellation cover the day you book the trip, not the week you fly — cancellation is the one section that is working from the moment the policy starts, and a policy bought late covers nothing that has already gone wrong. Second, read the medical acceptance in writing: the quote screen shows a price, and the acceptance shows which of your declared conditions the insurer has actually agreed to carry.

Finally, the form is the fastest part and the documents are not. The journey asks for cover type, destination, dates, trip length, group size and dates of birth before it shows a price, which takes a couple of minutes; the policy wording behind the cheapest result takes rather longer, and it is where the excess, the limits in the table above and the activity exclusions live. The site itself gives no advice and makes no recommendation — its terms say so twice — which means every one of those judgements is yours.

Figures were taken from each provider's own published terms on 17 September 2026. Variable rates can change at any time — confirm the current rate with the provider before applying.