Coverwise Travel Insurance Review: Five Levels, One Medical Limit

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Coverwise advertises single-trip cover from £3.60 and annual cover from £10.95, and every one of its five cover levels carries £20,000,000 of emergency medical expenses — the same limit on the cheapest policy as on the dearest. Limits read off Coverwise's own policy wordings on 18 September 2026.

That is unusual, and it is the most useful thing about the range. Most travel insurers sell the medical limit as the reason to trade up, so the cheap tier gets £5 million and the expensive one gets £15 million. Coverwise does not ration it. Standard Plus, Bronze, Silver Plus, Gold and Platinum all stop at the same £20,000,000, and the money you spend moving up the ladder buys a smaller excess and a bigger cancellation limit instead. Silver Plus, Gold and Platinum each hold a Defaqto 5 Star rating, and there are optional gadget, winter sports and business extensions from £19.95.

The licence on the paperwork is a Gibraltar one — Coverwise Limited, company 103717, registered at 2 Irish Town and holding Financial Services Commission registration FSC1107B. The telephone is not. Sales and complaints both run through 01903 255 650 in West Sussex, and the complaints address in the firm's own terms is a fourth-floor office in Worthing. That gap between where a brand is licensed and where it is actually answered is worth understanding before you buy, and it is set out further down.

The five levels, and the one number that never moves

Here is the ladder as the wordings print it, all five dated V.1.N 05/22 and all five underwritten by Inter Partner Assistance S.A. UK Branch.

Standard Plus pays £20,000,000 of emergency medical on a £100 excess, with £1,000 of cancellation, £1,000 of baggage, £200 of personal money, £50,000 of legal expenses and a £200 excess on the personal liability section. Bronze keeps the £100 excess and lifts cancellation to £1,500 and baggage to £1,750. Silver Plus halves the excess to £50 across almost every section, takes cancellation to £2,000, adds £1,000 of missed departure and drops the liability excess from £200 to £50. Gold holds the £50 excess and moves cancellation to £3,000 and baggage to £2,000. Platinum pays £6,000 of cancellation and £3,500 of baggage, lifts personal accident to £30,000 and delayed departure to £350, and charges no excess at all on most sections, including the medical one.

Read down that list and the medical column never changes. The gap between the cheapest policy and the dearest is £5,000 of extra cancellation cover, £2,500 of extra baggage and an excess falling from £100 to nothing. It is not more cover for a broken hip in Spain.

Which way that cuts depends on what you are protecting. If the trip cost £400 and your worry is a hospital bill, the £3.60 policy carries the identical limit to the expensive one and the upgrade buys you very little. If you have paid £4,000 up front for a fortnight and your real exposure is having to call it off, Standard Plus caps you at £1,000 and only Platinum's £6,000 covers the whole thing. Cancellation, not medical, is the section that should decide which row of this table you land on — which is the opposite of how the range is usually shopped.

One detail that is easy to miss on the cheaper levels: an excess normally applies per person and per section. Two travellers claiming on baggage and personal money on a Standard Plus policy meet £100 four times over, and on a £1,000 baggage limit that is a sizeable share of the claim.

Two insurers behind one brand, and the FAQ that is written twice

Coverwise is an intermediary, so it does not carry any of this risk itself, and the name on the certificate is not always the same one. The footer of the website says the insurance is underwritten by AWP P&C S.A. acting through its UK branch, authorised in France by L'Autorité de Contrôle Prudentiel et de Résolution and regulated here under firm reference 534384, and administered by AWP Assistance UK Ltd, trading as Allianz, under firm reference 311909. Every current policy wording served from the site's /Documents/UK/5/ path instead names Inter Partner Assistance S.A. UK Branch, part of the AXA Group, firm reference 202664, with claims run by AXA Travel Insurance. An older Gold wording sitting one directory across, at /Documents/UK/6/, is the AWP one.

The frequently asked questions settle the matter: every answer is given twice, once for AWP P&C S.A. and once for Inter Partner Assistance S.A. Both sets of schemes are live, in other words, and the honest reading is that this is a brand with two panels of paper behind it rather than a site that has forgotten to update itself.

The reassuring part is that the two sets of numbers match. The AWP Gold wording and the AXA Gold wording both pay £20,000,000 of emergency medical on a £50 excess, £3,000 of cancellation and £2,000 of baggage. Whichever insurer you are given, the cover summary is the same document with a different crest on it, and both firms are large European travel insurers rather than anybody obscure.

The answers do diverge in one place worth knowing about. Under an AWP policy, legal expenses pay up to the limit for you but “not more than twice this amount in total for all people insured under this policy”. Under an Inter Partner Assistance policy, legal expenses carry “a limit per policy (single trip) or a limit per trip (annual multi trip) irrespective of the number of individuals insured”. On a family annual policy making one legal claim between four people, those are different sums of money. Nothing on the quote screen tells you which rule you are buying.

What the free card does, and the part it never touches

A £20,000,000 limit sounds like a number invented by a marketing department, and it is worth saying plainly why it is not. The expensive half of a travel medical claim is rarely the treatment. It is the aeroplane: an air ambulance, a stretcher across three rows of a scheduled flight, a doctor and a nurse travelling with you, and a second seat home for whoever you were travelling with.

That is also exactly the part the state does not cover. The NHS Business Services Authority is unambiguous about the free UK Global Health Insurance Card: “Your UK EHIC or UK GHIC is not a substitute for travel insurance. It may not cover all health costs and never covers repatriation costs. Make sure you have travel insurance as well as a UK EHIC or UK GHIC.” The card is free to apply for and covers emergency treatment and A&E visits on the same terms as a local resident. It will not fly you home, and outside its list of countries it does nothing at all.

So the sensible way to read Coverwise's cheapest policy is as the repatriation cover the card cannot give you, bought for the price of a sandwich. At £3.60 for four days in Europe, that is 90p a day against a limit of £20 million, and even the £100 excess only bites on claims small enough that you would probably have paid them yourself. Carry the card as well — it costs nothing and it can settle the local bill before the insurer is involved — but the insurer is the one with the aeroplane.

Where the same arithmetic stops flattering the cheap tier is the ski page. Winter sports cover starts at £19.95 and is capped at 17 days in a policy year on an annual multi-trip, which is a fortnight and a long weekend. A second week on the snow is not covered by simply paying the premium again.

Gibraltar on the licence, Worthing on the telephone

Coverwise Limited is a Gibraltar company, number 103717, with its head office at 2 Irish Town, Gibraltar GX11 1AA, licensed by the Financial Services Commission there under registration FSC1107B and trading into the UK on a freedom of services basis under firm reference 533101. Read that on its own and you might expect an offshore shell.

The documents say otherwise. The complaints route in Coverwise's own terms is “The Operations Manager, 4th Floor, Southfield House, Liverpool Gardens, Worthing, BN11 1RY”, with a duty manager reachable on 01903 255 650. Its older policy wordings give a different West Sussex address, 77-79 High Street, Steyning, BN44 3RE. Both belong to Southdowns Insurance Services Limited, a UK broker at Companies House under number 07285096, incorporated on 15 June 2010 as Southdowns Contact Services Limited and renamed on 12 March 2013, which publishes its terms of business from the Worthing address, answers a duty manager on 01903 255659 and files its accounts to 31 March. Its documents sit behind the same directory structure as Coverwise's. Neither firm's public paperwork states the relationship, so treat the link as what the addresses and the file paths show rather than as a stated fact — but the practical point stands, which is that a Gibraltar licence here does not mean a call centre you cannot reach.

Two things about that paperwork are less impressive. The terms and conditions say Coverwise is licensed “under the Financial Services Act 1989”. Gibraltar replaced that regime on 15 January 2020, when the Financial Services Act 2019 came into force and consolidated roughly 90 separate pieces of legislation into one framework. The citation has been out of date for more than six years. And the About Us page carries no trading history, no customer numbers and no scale figures of any kind, under a copyright line reading 2010 — so how big this business is, and how long it has been doing this, is not something the site will tell you.

Nor will it tell you what it earns. The terms are clear that no advice or recommendation is given, which is fair and normal for an online travel policy, but the commission taken from your premium is not stated anywhere, and the Southdowns terms of business separately allow “an administration fee of up to £25.00 for any mid-term change to the policy”.

The ages, the dates and the declarations that decide a claim

Three eligibility rules do more to determine whether Coverwise suits you than any benefit limit, and none of them is on the front page.

The first is age. An annual multi-trip policy is “not available to anyone aged 66 or over”, and a single trip policy is not available to anyone aged 76 or over. Those are hard doors rather than loadings: a 66th birthday ends the annual product outright, and a 76th ends the relationship. For an older traveller this is the wrong provider, and the range gives no route round it.

The second is trip length. Standard Plus and Bronze cover “any trip not exceeding 24 days” on an annual policy; Silver Plus, Gold and Platinum stretch that to 31 days. A five-week visit to family, or a month plus a few days either side, falls outside the two cheaper levels entirely, and the difference costs less to fix at the quote stage than at the airport.

The third is your medical history. The Select wordings require disclosure of “any medical condition for which you have taken or been prescribed medication…within the last 2 years”, and an undeclared condition is treated as deliberate or reckless misrepresentation, which lets the insurer cancel the policy with no refund and decline the claim. Coverwise's own medical page puts it more directly: an omission “could affect the validity of your policy or result in claims being declined, even if the claim is not related to the undeclared condition”. To its credit, the firm says it does not sell policies that simply exclude undeclared conditions, and it points travellers it cannot quote for towards MoneyHelper's travel insurance directory on 0800 138 7777. Medical-screened cover starts at £15.00.

One last date. You have 14 days from receiving the documents to cancel for a full refund, provided you have not travelled and have not claimed. After that the terms give no refund at all, whatever is left of the policy year — so an annual policy cancelled in month two is paid for in full.

What a five-star rating is actually measuring

Coverwise puts Defaqto 5 Star against Silver Plus, Gold and Platinum, and the rating is real. Defaqto describes its method plainly: its experts “choose between 30 and 100 features and benefits, against which every policy/product in the market is scored”. A five-star travel policy is a policy with a long and generous feature list, independently scored.

What that sentence also tells you is the limit of the badge. It is a count of what is in the wording, so it says nothing about the price, nothing about how quickly a claim is settled, and nothing about the telephone. A 5 Star policy with a £100 excess and a 5 Star policy with no excess score on the same scale.

The rating on the Coverwise site also carries no year against it, which matters because Defaqto refreshes these and a wording dated 05/22 has had four years to be overtaken. If the star rating is part of why you are buying, it is worth asking which cover level and which year the award belongs to before you rely on it. The same goes for the two lower levels, Standard Plus and Bronze, which are not claimed to hold the rating at all — on a range where the medical limit is identical throughout, the honest summary is that the badge is marking the cancellation and excess columns, not the headline one.

Figures were taken from each provider's own published terms on 18 September 2026. Variable rates can change at any time — confirm the current rate with the provider before applying.