How Compare Travel Insurance Ratings Work
Our review platform is open to everybody and we want to help consumers make confident, informed decisions. We want you to be able to trust the star rating you see next to every travel insurer on our site. This page explains how those ratings are calculated.
1. What customers rate
When you leave a review, we ask you to score your insurer out of 5. The overall rating is made up of the scores given for each of these areas.
- Customer experience – how easy the insurer was to deal with, including communication and support.
- Value for money – whether the cover felt worth the price you paid comparative to the market.
- Claims experience – if you made a claim, how well the insurer handled the process
If you haven't made a claim, you should mark claims experience as N/A. We don't ask you to guess, and the fact that you didn’t need to claim, shouldn’t count it against the insurer. That category will simply be left out of your review score average.
2. How one review becomes a score
For each review, we average the categories you've actually rated. So:
- If you rated all three categories, your review score is the average of all three.
- If you marked claims experience as N/A, your review score is the average of the other two.
This gives a score out of 5.
3. How an insurer's overall rating is calculated
We don't publish an oversll star rating for an insurer until they've received at least 10 reviews.
- A handful of reviews isn't enough to give a reliable picture of an insurer's performance. One exceptionally good or bad experience can skew the result and create a misleading impression. Requiring at least 10 reviews helps ensure the rating reflects a broader pattern of customer experiences rather than a few individual stories.
- Until an insurer reaches that threshold, they’ll be shown as "N/A”. You'll still be able to see how many reviews they've received and read what customers have said, you just won't see an overall star rating.
- Once an insurer has 10 or more reviews, every review counts. If an insurer has 100 reviews, all 100 are included in the overall rating. No reviews are discarded, ignored or capped.
4. How we calculate the score
Once an insurer has 10 or more reviews, we calculate their star rating using an average.
A simple average treats every insurer's review in isolation, which means an insurer with only 10 reviews and an insurer with 1,000 reviews could both show, for example, 4.8 stars- even though we should trust the 1,000-review score far more. A Bayesian average corrects for this by blending each insurer's own reviews with the average score across all insurers on our site:
- The fewer reviews an insurer has (closer to our 10-review minimum), the more their score is pulled toward the site-wide average, reflecting the fact that we don't yet have much evidence either way.
- The more reviews an insurer has, the more their own reviews dominate the calculation, until the site-wide average has almost no effect at all.
In practice, this means:
- An insurer with 10 reviews all rated 5/5 won't jump straight to 5 stars - their score will sit closer to the middle until more reviews confirm that performance.
- An insurer with hundreds or thousands of consistently strong reviews will see their true average shine through, because there's enough evidence to be confident in it.
This stops a small handful of very positive (or very negative) reviews from giving an insurer a rating that doesn't reflect how they actually perform for most customers.
4. Why review volume still matters to you
Because we don't hide or adjust for review count, we make sure you can see it for yourself. Every star rating is shown alongside the number of reviews it's based on, so you can judge the weight of that score:
- A 5-star rating from 1 review is one person's experience- worth reading, but not yet a trend.
- A 4.6-star rating from 300 reviews reflects a consistent, well-tested track record.
We'd always encourage you to glance at the review count, not just the stars, before making a decision.
5. Recency: recent reviews count for more
Insurance products, pricing, and service quality can change over time - an insurer that had a rough claims process two years ago may have significantly improved since. To keep ratings representative of what you can expect today, we weight reviews by how recent they are:
- Newer reviews carry more weight in the score calculation than older ones.
- Older reviews still count, but their influence gradually decreases as more recent reviews come in.
This means an insurer's rating is always a good reflection of their current service, not just their history.
Insurance products, pricing, and service quality can change over time — an insurer that had a rough claims process two years ago may have significantly improved since. To keep ratings representative of what you can expect today, we weight reviews based on how recent they are:
- Reviews from the last 12 months count at full weight.
- After that, weight decays gradually rather than dropping by a single flat discount. A review carries roughly 50% weight at 24 months, and roughly 30% weight at 36 months.
- Reviews continue to count beyond that point too, but their influence keeps tapering the older they get.
This means an insurer's rating is always a good reflection of their current service, not just their history.
6. Multiple reviews
Customers can leave more than one review if they have different experiences with different insurers. We only factor in a customer’s most recent review when calculating the score.
All reviews remain in a customers profile if you are logged into our platform. Insurers have the option to respond to customer reviews.
5. Keeping it fair
- Every rated category (customer experience, value for money, claims experience) is treated equally in the average, we don't weight one higher than another.
- N/A claims responses are excluded from the maths entirely; they never pull a score down.
- Ratings update daily as new reviews come in, so the score you see reflects the most current picture.
Our goal is simple: show you what real customers experienced, calculated the same way for every insurer, with nothing hidden.