Insurance2go Phone Insurance Review

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Insurance2go has been selling mobile phone cover since 2007 and is the trading name of Loyal Insurance Services Ltd, a Portsmouth company registered on 2 February 2005 and authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority under firm reference 430316. Since 28 March 2019 it has belonged to SPB, a European affinity insurance group, which runs the brand from 3000 Lakeside, Western Road alongside Better Buy Insurance. Cover starts at £1.99 a month for a phone, and the company says it accepted 94% of the mobile phone claims made in 2024.

The policy is more generous than most network and bank alternatives in one respect that matters: there is no cap on how many times you can claim while it is running. A single premium buys accidental damage, liquid damage, mechanical breakdown, malicious damage, loss and theft, worldwide cover, up to £1,000 of unauthorised calls, texts and downloads in the 24 hours after a theft, £100 against unauthorised e-wallet payments and up to £150 for accessories on any one claim. Claims are assessed within two working days, replacements go out in three to five, and repairs take around five to seven. Buying a year up front costs twelve months for the price of ten, and a second device takes 10% off.

One rule decides whether any of that is open to you. The phone must have been bought in the UK and must be no more than 36 months old on the day the policy starts. Once it is on cover it stays on cover as it ages, but a four-year-old handset cannot be added at all, and neither can one bought overseas or second-hand without a twelve-month warranty from a UK-registered supplier.

The two price tiers, and the gap the site never explains

Two levels are sold. Essential opens at £1.99 a month and Full at £3.49, both including insurance premium tax at 12%. On a named handset the difference is smaller than those headline numbers suggest: the iPhone 13 page quotes Essential from £2.49 and Full from £4.99, which is a gap of £2.50 a month, or £30 a year.

What that £30 buys is the part nobody at the company has written down. The comparison table on the mobile phone page, read on 1 September 2026, lists ten benefits — new or refurbished phones, accidental damage, mechanical breakdown, malicious damage, liquid damage, worldwide cover, loss, theft, e-wallet payments and unauthorised usage — and ticks every one of them for both Essential and Full. Read that table on its own and the cheaper tier looks identical to the dearer one.

The company's own Essential product information document says something different. Reference I2G-IPIDE-0920, published in 2020 and still the copy served from the site, lists accidental damage, breakdown, malicious damage, accessories and worldwide cover under what is insured, and puts theft and loss claims under what is not. Both documents belong to Insurance2go, they cannot both describe the same product, and the one that would settle it is six years old. Anyone buying Essential specifically for theft cover should get that confirmed in writing before paying.

There is a smaller version of the same problem on price. The home page advertises gadget cover from £2.99 a month; the gadget insurance page says from £4.49. Tablet cover is quoted at £4.49 and SIM-only phone cover at £2.99.

The excess is the number to check first

Insurance2go does not publish an excess table, and the figure only appears once you have run a quote. The iPhone pages are the exception, and they show a ladder that tracks the value of the handset rather than the type of claim. An iPhone 11 carries a £50 excess at £4.99 a month. An iPhone 12, 12 Mini, 13 or 14 carries £100 at £5.99. The Pro models sit at £125 and £7.49. An iPhone 13 Pro Max is £150 and £9.99 a month, or £99.90 for the year.

The company's own guide to low-excess cover puts the outer edges of the range at “around £150” for high-specification models and “as little as £25” for cheaper, older ones. Set the top of that ladder against the premium and the arithmetic of a first-year claim on a Pro Max is £99.90 in premium plus £150 in excess: £249.90, in exchange for a refurbished handset of the same age and condition as the one you lost.

A second charge sits on top of that in the first month. The Early Excess is described by the company as “an additional fee applied to claims made within the first 31 days of your policy's start date, or within 31 days of any changes to the covered device(s)”. During that window a claimant pays the standard excess, the early excess and, on monthly payment plans, the full first month's premium before the claim is processed. The amount is not published; like the standard excess, it appears on the certificate schedule. It is a reasonable enough guard against someone insuring a phone they have already broken, but it means the cheapest month of the policy is also the most expensive month in which to have an accident.

Three firms behind one phone number

Buying here puts three companies between you and your money, which is normal for this corner of the market but worth understanding before a claim. Loyal Insurance Services Ltd sells the policy. Citymain Administrators Ltd, company 03979666 and FRN 306535, takes the payments, handles the claims and answers the phone from the same Portsmouth address. An insurer carries the risk and is named only in the policy paperwork.

On the current gadget documents that insurer is Collinson Insurance, a trading name of Astrenska Insurance Limited, FRN 202846. Astrenska is a real balance sheet rather than a brand: company 01708613, and its published solvency and financial condition report for the year to 30 April 2025 shows gross written premium of £297.2m, up from £221.4m the year before, and a profit of £4.289m against £3.198m. Its solvency capital requirement was £21.595m against eligible own funds of £38.026m, a coverage ratio of 176% — comfortably above the regulatory minimum, though down from 205% a year earlier. Mobile and gadget business sits inside the £35.3m the report books under fire and other damage to property, which makes it a modest part of a book dominated by travel and medical expense cover.

The business version of the product runs through two more entities, Square Pound Limited (company 07665065, FRN 564471) and Burnett & Associates Ltd (company 01472537, FRN 305511). All of these firm reference numbers can be checked on the Financial Services Register.

Four wordings, four insurers, and none of them current

The paperwork a shopper can read before buying is where this brand looks weakest, and it is worth setting out in order because the pattern is what matters.

The oldest document still served from the site is the full policy wording marked v7 and dated 14 May 2018. It names UK General Insurance Ltd, underwriting on behalf of Great Lakes Insurance SE. Next comes reference I2G/CW/0920, dated September 2020, which names UK General Insurance Limited on behalf of Watford Insurance Company Europe Limited. The mobile phone product information document, reference I2G_MPI_IPID_F_0521 and dated May 2021, names a third insurer again: Inter Partner Assistance S.A. UK Branch, FRN 202664. Only the gadget paperwork is recent — the product information document referenced I2G_FULL_GADGET_IPID_1024 from October 2024 and the terms and conditions referenced I2G-SINGLEGDGT-PD-1224 from December 2024, both naming Astrenska.

So the newest phone-specific document on the site is five years old, and the three phone documents between them name three different insurers. That does not mean the cover is unreliable; insurers change hands and schemes get re-papered, and the underlying benefits described in all four documents are broadly the same. It does mean that a customer buying a phone policy today cannot establish from the published documents who would actually be carrying their risk. That needs confirming on the phone before buying, and it is the single most useful question to ask.

One consequence is already visible. The excesses quoted in the 2018 wording run from £75 to £100 by model, which is not the £50 to £150 ladder the current iPhone pages show. Neither of the two current-era documents carries an excess table at all.

What a claim asks of you

The claims route is genuinely quick on paper. A claim goes in through the 24-hour portal, by phone, email or post; the company aims to respond within two working days; once authorised it emails instructions for paying the excess; a repair means posting the handset by registered mail in a padded envelope and takes around five to seven days, and a replacement arrives in three to five working days.

The evidence list is longer than most people expect. Every claim needs proof of purchase showing make, model and IMEI number. Theft and loss claims need a police or loss report reference, and the wording requires you to notify the local police as soon as possible after discovering the incident and to contact your network provider, also as soon as possible, to place a call bar. The company's claim documents page also asks, depending on circumstances, for a gifting letter, proof of exchange, proof of usage, an itemised phone bill, proof of blacklisting and proof of travel, and points customers to Immobilise and reportmyloss.com. A phone handed down from a family member without a gifting letter is a claim waiting to be argued about.

Two exclusions do more work than the rest. The wording states that you must not leave the phone unattended where it is accessible to the general public, and that no claim will be paid for property left unattended in publicly accessible places. And theft from a vehicle is excluded unless the windows and doors were closed and locked, the security systems were activated and the phone was out of view in an enclosed storage compartment, boot or luggage space. A phone taken from a table in a pub garden, or from a cupholder in a locked car, falls outside both.

The replacement itself is refurbished by design. The wording says the administrator “will endeavour to replace your mobile phone with an identical, fully refurbished (or new where a refurbished item is not available) mobile phone of the same age and condition”. That is standard across this market, but it is worth knowing before the parcel arrives — the Financial Ombudsman Service lists “replacement phone or gadget is refurbished and not a new one” among the recurring grounds of complaint it sees on these policies, alongside mis-selling, misleading policy wording, exclusions applied at claim time, automatic renewal and cover running on after the phone contract ended. All repairs and replacements are carried out in the United Kingdom, whatever the worldwide cover implies about where you can break the phone.

Gadget cover in the regulator's own numbers

The FCA publishes value measures data on retail general insurance, most recently on 21 July 2026 covering calendar year 2025, and gadget insurance is one of the lines it reports. Firms report where written retail premiums exceed £400,000 and more than 3,000 policies are in force, so the data covers the market rather than every seller in it.

Gadget cover paid out 36% of premiums in claims in 2025, down from 42% the year before. Policies in force fell 5% to 7.5 million, claims registered fell 8% and claims costs fell 12%, while premiums rose 3%. For comparison, motor insurance paid 59% of premium in claims over the same period. That gap is the honest context for any phone policy: as a class, these products keep a much larger share of the premium than motor or home cover does, which is the arithmetic behind the standard advice to weigh a year of premiums plus the excess against what the handset is actually worth.

What the FCA does not publish is a claims acceptance rate for gadget insurance. It gives them for home (62% to 71%), travel (83% to 86%) and motor (99%), and gadget is not among them. Insurance2go's 94% is therefore its own figure, defined by the company as authorised against rejected claims made in 2024, excluding pending and abandoned ones — a fair enough definition, but one with no published benchmark to sit against.

The Ombudsman's annual complaints data, published 21 May 2026, records 899 new mobile phone insurance complaints in 2025/26 at a 25% uphold rate, against 214,600 complaints across all products and a 30% average. That is a small line and a below-average uphold rate, and it says nothing about any individual firm. Ofcom's pricing report of 26 February 2026 explains why the standalone market exists at all: SIM-only plans accounted for half of pay-monthly subscriptions by June 2025 at around £18 a month, and taking the handset through the contract instead costs over £8 a month more, roughly £200 across 24 months. A phone bought outright is a phone with no insurance attached.

How much independent evidence there is

Less than the marketing implies. The company's own news page dates its Defaqto 5 Star rating to 1 February 2019 and attaches it to the full cover mobile phone policy. Defaqto reissues its ratings annually, so a badge from early 2019 tells you what the product looked like more than seven years ago, and no current rating for the brand could be read from Defaqto's own site.

Smart Money People carries a rating of 3.44 out of 5 for Insurance2go's gadget insurance, but from only five reviews, three of which are one star. Five reviews is far too small a sample to draw anything from, and it is quoted here only because it is the one independent score that exists.

There is a live award nomination: Insurance2go announced on 3 July 2026 that it had been shortlisted for Best Mobile/Gadget Insurance Service at the 2026 Mobile Industry Awards, with winners announced on 17 September 2026. A shortlisting is not a win, and this page was written before that date.

One last inconsistency, and a small one. The about page says the company has a 93% approval rate for claims, while the home page and the mobile phone page both say 94% of 2024 claims. The difference is a rounding argument rather than a scandal, but on a site where the claims acceptance rate is the headline selling point, two versions of it is one too many.

Figures were taken from each provider's own published terms on 1 September 2026. Variable rates can change at any time — confirm the current rate with the provider before applying.