Ethical Travel Insurance

Ethical travel insurance companies

In this guide we look at travel insurance companies’ investment and climate policies, what their tax arrangements are, and if they have connections to weapons and the military. We are rating underwriters like AXA, Aviva and Admiral, not brokers like Saga and the AA.

With some very low scoring big-name brands, and the highest scoring brands barely reaching 50 (out of 100) in our ethical ratings score table there is not a massive amount of choice for travel insurance. However, there are differences between the brands so it is worth choosing those who align more closely with your ethics.

What's the difference between underwriters and brokers?

There are two main types of company that sell insurance – underwriters and brokers.

Brokers and price comparison websites sell policies on behalf of underwriters. They make money by receiving a commission from the underwriter, once a policy is sold.

In this guide we are only rating underwriters. These are the companies that take most of the money from an insurance premium (but which also pay out when something goes wrong) and therefore have the most impact. Several underwriters also sell directly to the public, or belong to the same company group as the broker itself. 

To complicate matters, brokers can sell policies from a variety of underwriters. And underwriters selling directly to the public can sometimes use different underwriters for other specific policies and risks. 

You should be able to find out the underwriter from the 'Key facts' or policy wording documents which must be provided when you’re considering buying a policy. Comparison websites will also sometimes tell you. 

Ethical consumers should check the underwriters against our score table for the quotes offered, and then make an informed choice based on their own priorities. For example, the broker may offer you a quote and policy from AXA, but you have chosen to avoid AXA. It may be worth asking them to search again, give them names of underwriters you'd like to avoid, or try a different broker, if the options provided aren't great. 

Green or ethical insurance brokers

Although brokers are not rated in our scoretable in this guide, we have included short profiles a couple of green or ethical travel insurance brokers below, so you can consider them as options for sourcing your travel insurance. 

Naturesave

Naturesave is a specialist green insurance broker owned by the Benefact Group, who also own Ecclesiastical insurance. It campaigns around climate issues and supports green projects through its trust. It offers insurance for home, travel, renewable energy, businesses, and charities (but not car insurance).

It was listed as the first ever Ethical Consumer Best Buy for insurance in May 2023. We are no longer including it in the main ranking tables, as we now only rate underwriters, not brokers.

Other companies in the Benefact Group include Ecclesiastical in the home insurance guide, and EdenTree in ethical investment funds).

The Benefact Group has a high overall ethiscore, and scores 100/100 for several categories (tax conduct, investment policy, portfolio holdings, and bonds & underwriting).

Naturesave lists the underwriters it uses on its website. For travel insurance it is currently (as of 25th June 2025) AXA, which is on the Palestine/BDS boycott list.

Evergreen

Evergreen Insurance Services offers home, travel, car, and business insurance. It donates some of its commission revenue to animal and wildlife charities including the Vegan and Vegetarian societies. As of 25th June 2025, its SunWorld policy was underwritten by AXA but not the JustTravel one.
 

Price comparison websites

The are four main price comparison websites in the UK. Although none of them really talk about ethics, perhaps the most straightforward of all the businesses, and our favourites at this stage, are Money Supermarket and Go.Compare.

We haven't done a full ethical review of them at this stage, so the sketches below are just for readers to get a sense of who they are dealing with.

1) Go.Compare

Go.Compare is a bit of an outlier here in that it is owned by the large global magazine publisher Future plc. It has well-known brands in its portfolio of over 200 titles including Woman’s Own and Marie Claire.

2) Money Supermarket

A smaller specialist company based in North Wales, MONY group also owns MoneySavingExpert and travelsupermarket.com

Travel insurance and transparency of investments

An insurer's investment policies are of crucial importance to ethical consumers. Without scrutiny, you may inadvertently be funding unethical activities like coal mines or armaments with your premiums.

Our Investment Policy rating rewarded companies for having policies which restricted the types of companies they invested in. 

We looked for exclusions on:

• fossil fuels
• arms
• factory farming
• companies involved in human rights and workers’ rights abuses.  

Most insurance companies have some basic kind of ethical investment or exclusion policy and so scored 20/100. Only Aviva scored more because it also excluded companies which did not meet the standards of the UN Global Compact (which contained criteria on workers' rights).

Are travel insurance companies addressing climate change?

The less a company restricts its investments, the higher the possibility that it will be investing in climate damaging companies.  

All of the companies in this guide scored 0/100 for our climate change rating because they are all involved in the development of new fossil fuel projects or are involved in coal in any way. 

They may have scored reasonably well in other parts of our climate rating, such as their reporting of their emissions or their past and future actions to reduce emissions, but still score 0 in this category. 

Travel insurance providers' ratings for ethical issues

Below we focus on a few of the categories where we have reviewed and rated the travel insurance providers.

Tax avoidance

Tax avoidance strategies appear to be prevalent in the industry.

Apart from Admiral and NFU Mutual, all the other companies in our guide showed signs of likely use of tax avoidance and so scored 0/100 in the Tax Conduct category.

NFU Mutual scored 70/100 as it did have subsidiaries in tax havens, however it had a clear statement that it didn’t use them for tax avoidance purposes. 

Admiral had one subsidiary in a tax haven and we found no explanation of its presence there or statement that it didn’t engage in tax avoidance so it scored 20/100.

Directors’ remuneration

Ethical Consumer considers any remuneration over £1m to be excessive, so companies awarding pay of £1m or over lose 10 points in our Company Ethos category on our score tables in our shopping guides. Over £10m and they lose 20 points. 

All the companies in this guide lost 10 points for paying directors £1m-£10 million.

We have a separate article about excessive high pay in the financial sector.

Arms and military supply

With war raging just a couple of thousand miles away you may be interested in/sensitive to knowing which companies finance arms.

AXA and Allianz were named in the 2025 ‘Don’t Bank on the Bomb’ report highlighting investments in nuclear weapons.

See also ‘Travel Insurance and Israel’ above for insurance companies connected to arms companies supplying the Israeli state.

We have a separate article which looks at banks and military spending.

Company Ethos

NFU Mutual received some points for being owned by a mutual organisation but it has numerous less helpful policies which are explored in a feature on the car insurance guide.

Pay inequality in insurance

The finance industry in the United Kingdom has been known to be the worst performing in terms of pay between full-time male and female employees. 

Our article on the finance sector and the pay gap has more detail.