Quotezone.co.uk Travel Insurance

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Travel insurance is bought in the last ten minutes before a holiday and read for the first time in a hospital corridor. Quotezone puts up to 15 UK travel insurers behind one questionnaire, returns their prices in a few minutes and charges the traveller nothing for it, which at least removes the excuse that shopping around takes too long.

The brand belongs to Seopa Ltd, a Belfast technology firm whose comparison engine has been quoting since the early 2000s; the Quotezone site itself dates its launch to 2005. Seopa now runs over 5 million quotes a year for more than 4 million UK customers across 60+ insurance and finance products, holds relationships with 300+ providers, employs over 70 people across two European offices, and is one of only 11 price comparison services accredited by Ofgem for energy. It has carried Deloitte Best Managed Company status at Platinum level since 2017.

Two figures set the stakes before any price appears. The panel's own published limits run from £10m of emergency medical cover up to unlimited, with cancellation caps between £10,000 and £25,000. And the Association of British Insurers counted £472 million paid out on UK travel claims in 2024. Cover at that scale for the price of a couple of airport pints is the reason the form is worth filling in properly.

The bill a travel policy stands behind

The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office publishes the numbers it has seen British travellers landed with, and they are the most useful thing anyone will read before buying. A broken leg needing hospital treatment in Spain: £25,000 and upwards. Surgery after a quad bike accident in Greece: £80,000. A serious stomach infection in the United States: £150,000.

Insurers met £472 million of UK travel claims across more than 500,000 individual claims in 2024, on ABI figures. Emergency medical treatment took £262 million of that — 34% of the money paid, up from 29% the year before — at an average of £1,528 a medical claim, and one member insurer settled a single case of hospital treatment and repatriation from the USA at over £1 million.

A free UK Global Health Insurance Card is worth carrying and is valid for up to 5 years, but the NHS is blunt that it covers state treatment only. It does not pay for repatriation, treatment in a private facility, or ski and mountain rescue — the three items that turn an incident abroad into a five-figure bill. That gap is what the fifteen insurers on the panel are competing to fill.

Who takes your details, and who pays for the service

Seopa's initial disclosure document is short and unusually candid, and it is the paperwork worth reading before the quotes load. The firm is authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority under reference 313860 as a non-investment insurance intermediary and credit broker — a status anyone can confirm on the FCA Register. The document then describes the site as a quote comparison service and internet directory, states plainly that it is not an insurance or financial broker, and adds the sentence that matters most: you will not receive advice or a recommendation from it.

Payment comes from the other side of the transaction. Providers pay Seopa a flat fee, a commission on a completed sale, or a combination, so the traveller pays nothing and the incentive sits with whichever insurers choose to appear. The same document also declines to claim whole-of-market coverage, acknowledging that some insurers stay off comparison sites altogether.

Protection if things go wrong is real but narrow. Seopa aims to answer a complaint by the next working day, and once eight weeks have passed a complainant can take it to the Financial Ombudsman Service. The Financial Services Compensation Scheme covers non-investment insurance mediation at 90% of a claim with no upper limit, rising to 100% for compulsory classes — which travel insurance is not. Note too that every price shown already carries Insurance Premium Tax at the higher rate of 20% rather than the 12% standard rate charged on a car or home policy; travel cover was pulled into the higher band in 1998 and has stayed there.

What the fifteen are quoting on

A single-trip quote generally assumes a holiday of 30 or 31 days; anything longer needs asking for. Annual multi-trip policies typically allow 31 to 45 days per trip, stretch to 90 days on request with some insurers, and cap total time abroad at around 183 days in the year — the trap for anyone splitting a winter between two countries. A family policy usually means two adults living together plus up to 8 children under 18, and pregnancy is commonly covered to 38 weeks.

Where the site earns its keep is showing how far apart the fifteen sit on cover rather than price. Among the specialist medical insurers it lists, AllClear quotes emergency medical to £15m, cancellation to £25,000, baggage to £2,500 and a maximum excess of £500. InsureandGo shows unlimited medical, £10,000 cancellation, £3,000 baggage and a maximum excess of £60. Get Going runs £10m medical with £5,000 of baggage cover, while Freedom and OK To Travel both pair £10m medical with £15,000 cancellation and a £150 excess.

Read that spread twice. Cancellation cover varies by £15,000 between the top and bottom of one short list, and the excess by a factor of more than eight. On a claim for a cancelled family holiday, the difference between a £10,000 cap and a £25,000 cap is worth vastly more than the few pounds separating the premiums. Winter sports, cruise, backpacker and business trips are all quoted through the same form, each adding its own conditions on the cover behind them.

Declaring a condition is where travel cover is won and lost

Every insurer on the panel screens medical history, and the site's own guidance lists the conditions that must be declared even when dormant — arthritis, asthma, cancer in remission, depression, diabetes, epilepsy, heart conditions, high blood pressure, raised cholesterol. Failing to declare one when asked lets the insurer decline the claim. The FCDO gives the same warning about undeclared conditions and pending test results.

Complaint data shows how often this bites. The Financial Ombudsman Service took 4,466 travel insurance complaints in 2023/24, 19% more than the 3,745 of the year before and well clear of the 2,510 it saw in 2019/20, with declined claims over medical conditions said not to have been properly disclosed among the leading causes.

Regulation has already recognised that a standard panel prices serious conditions badly. FCA signposting rules in force since 5 November 2020 require a firm to point a customer towards a directory of specialist medical travel insurers once the medical element of the premium passes a trigger point — set at £100 originally and doubled to £200 from 1 January 2026. The regulator estimated 338,000 to 376,000 consumers a year could benefit, with savings of roughly 40% available to those with more serious conditions who move to a specialist, though its later review found the rules had produced around 21,000 extra policy sales, fewer than expected. The British Insurance Brokers' Association directory those rules point to has now passed 400,000 enquiries. If a quote comes back with a large medical loading, that directory is the next call, not the checkout button.

Where the comparison runs out of road

Fifteen insurers is a thin panel by the standards of the same site's other products, which draw on 300+ provider relationships, and the disclosure document does not pretend otherwise. Several sizeable travel names sell direct only, and a cheapest-on-the-panel price is not a cheapest-in-market price.

No advice means the suitability judgement is entirely the traveller's. On motor cover that is a modest risk; on travel it is the whole game, because the excess, the medical limit and the wording on pre-existing conditions decide whether a claim is paid, and a results page sorted by price puts the £60 excess and the £500 excess side by side with nothing but the premium to tell them apart.

The market itself is under strain, which is worth knowing before renewal. The FCA's value measures data for 2025 shows travel insurance claims costs jumping to 44–48% of premiums from 31–37% in 2024, with premiums up 12% while payouts rose 47%. Claims acceptance across travel products sits at 83–86%, healthier than home insurance, but complaints run at 5–6% of claims, high against other retail insurance lines. Prices are unlikely to fall from here.

Two smaller cautions. Travel to a destination where the FCDO advises against all or all but essential travel will invalidate most policies on the panel, and that is checked at claim stage rather than at purchase. And the initial disclosure document still carries an older Belfast address for Seopa than the one on the site's own about page — a housekeeping detail rather than a regulatory one, but the disclosure document is the piece of paper describing how the firm is paid, so it is the one you would want current.

Figures were taken from each provider's own published terms on 19 August 2026. Variable rates can change at any time — confirm the current rate with the provider before applying.