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Ethical Travel Insurance

How to find an ethical and environmental travel insurance underwriter. This guide rates 6 companies on their ethical policies.

There's a lot of small print to look through when choosing a travel insurance provider, and transparency of their investment policies may be hard to find, so we've done the work for you.

If you don't want your travel insurance to be funding climate change, military investments or supporting companies with dubious tax policies, which are the best providers? 

We give our Best Buy recommendations and spotlight a couple of green and eco travel insurance brokers.

About our guides

This is a shopping guide from Ethical Consumer, the UK's leading alternative consumer organisation. Since 1989 we've been researching and recording the social and environmental records of companies, and making the results available to you in a simple format.

Learn more about our shopping guides   →

Score table

Updated daily from our research database. Read the FAQs to learn more.

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Brand Name of the company Score (out of 100) Ratings Categories Explore related ratings in detail

Brand X

Company Profile: Brand X ltd
90
  • Animal Products
  • Climate
  • Company Ethos
  • Cotton Sourcing
  • Sustainable Materials
  • Tax Conduct
  • Workers

Brand Y

Company Profile: Brand Y ltd
33
  • Animal Products
  • Climate
  • Company Ethos
  • Cotton Sourcing
  • Sustainable Materials
  • Tax Conduct
  • Workers

What to buy

What to look for when buying travel insurance:

  • Does it have ethical restrictions on its investments? Insurance companies can be essentially thought of as investment companies. Without restrictions insurers may invest in companies that damage the environment and the climate, or abuse animals.

  • Is it transparent about its investments? A responsible company's investment policy should be combined with transparency.

  • Does it have decent climate commitments? An insurance company's major climate impacts are its investments and underwriting. Some are making an attempt to address that, although others are still just talking about changing lightbulbs to LED.

What not to buy

What to avoid when buying ethical travel insurance:

  • Is it avoiding paying taxes? Many insurance companies have family trees that look very likely to be structured to facilitate tax avoidance.

  • Is it investing in arms and military supply? Several insurance companies fund arms companies, including nuclear weapons manufacturers.

Best buys (subscribe to view)

Companies to avoid (subscribe to view)

In-depth Analysis

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 companies and Israel

AXA has been the subject of a boycott since 2016

Although AXA divested fully from Elbit Systems (a leading Israeli arms manufacturer) in 2019 and from Israeli banks in 2024, the boycott remains in place, however, as recent research showed that in June 2024 the company held at least $150m of investments in eleven weapons manufacturers linked to Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza.

A recent report by Boycott Bloody Insurance also identified AXA as an investor in 13 companies involved in the supply of arms to Israel.

Allianz and Aviva, while not subject to a boycott, also hold investments in weapons manufacturers supplying Israel. According to the Boycott Bloody Insurance report, in February 2025, Allianz held over $450m worth of investments in 15 companies supplying the Israeli military, and the amount of its investment nearly doubled during the course of 2024. The report also identified Allianz as providing insurance to Elbit Systems.

Aviva was not identified as insuring any arms companies but it had by far the largest investments in them, holding over $880m in February 2025. The report concluded that the three companies could be “considered substantially complicit in fuelling the assault on Palestinians”.

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. 

Insure our future against fossil fuels

Insure Our Future is an international campaign calling on insurance companies to exit coal, oil and gas in line with a pathway limiting global warming to 1.5°C.

In 2024 it published a scorecard assessing and scoring 28 global insurance companies based on the effectiveness of their policies to phase out the provision of insurance and investment to coal, oil and gas companies.

The scorecard only covered three companies in this guide: Allianz, Aviva, and AXA. They all scored relatively well for their policies on underwriting fossil fuels but they all scored better on restricting investments in coal rather than oil and gas.

Read the full report on the Insure Our Future website.

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.

Thinking of booking a holiday?

Read our guide to ethical travel booking companies first!

The guide not only rates and reviews 29 travel companies, it also looks at the carbon impact of flying and alternative travel options, accommodation eco-labels, the impact of holiday homes (including Airbnb), and alternative sustainable holiday options.

It includes alternative package holidays and working/volunteer holidays.

Company profile: Allianz

Allianz is a German company with global operations. As well as offering personal insurance it provides cover to big businesses including “more than half of the Fortune Global 500 companies and ... most leading marine and aviation enterprises”.

In a March 2025 LinkedIn post, Allianz board member Günther Thallinger warned that the planet’s temperature was approaching a level at which insurers would no longer be able to insure basic assets.

“There is only one path forward: prevent any further increase in atmospheric energy levels. That means keeping emissions out of the atmosphere. That means burning less carbon or capturing it at the point of combustion.”

The company has set itself some meaningful carbon-reduction targets. But, according to NGO Reclaim Finance, Allianz’s investment subsidiary invested in at least 32 bonds of fossil fuel developers between 1 January 2023 and 30 June 2024. As Reclaim Finance states: “When buying new bonds, Allianz Global Investors provides fresh capital to these companies and enables them to launch new fossil fuel projects”.

Want to know more?

If you want to find out detailed information about a company and more about its ethical rating, then click on a brand name in the score table.

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