Who actually underwrites each Australian travel insurance brand
Travel insurance is sold under far more brands than there are insurers. Two brands a traveller is comparing often share an underwriter, and sometimes a distributor, so they share the company that carries the risk and handles the claim. Nothing on either website says so. They are not the same policy, though: see wording_overlap, which measures how much of their wording two brands actually have in common, and bear in mind that the price is set by the brand rather than the insurer.
This is a floor, not a measurement of the whole market. This is every brand a person has found and pinned a document for, not every brand in the market: there is no register of travel insurance brands to work from, and none of travel insurers either. Brands that could not be read are listed in not_collected with the reason. So the concentration here is a floor, and the insurers listed are those behind the brands read rather than every insurer writing travel cover in Australia. An insurer can appear here through one brand while its own retail site is among the ones not read, which is the case for Allianz.
By insurer
| Insurer | Brands | Which |
|---|---|---|
| Zurich Australian Insurance Limited | 5 | australia-post, budget-direct, cover-more, medibank, webjet |
| Lloyd's | 2 | fast-cover, travel-insurance-saver |
| Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Company Limited | 2 | insureandgo, tick |
| Allianz Australia Insurance Limited | 1 | travel-insurance-direct |
| HDI Global Speciality SE | 1 | zoom |
| Tokio Marine & Nichido Fire Insurance Co., Ltd | 1 | racv |
By brand
The register check compares the insurer the brand's own document names against APRA's register of general insurers and ASIC's licensee register, matching on the licence number or ABN where the document gives one. Lloyd's underwriters carry Australian risk under Lloyd's own authorisation rather than as a company on APRA's register, so for them the register cannot confirm anything and their absence from it means nothing.
| Brand | Underwritten by | Register check | Sold by | Cooling off |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Australia Post Travel Insurance | Zurich Australian Insurance Limited | APRA authorised | Australia Post Services Pty Ltd authorised representative | 21 days |
| Budget Direct Travel Insurance | Zurich Australian Insurance Limited | APRA authorised | Travel Insurance Partners Pty Limited agent of insurer | 21 days |
| Cover-More | Zurich Australian Insurance Limited | APRA authorised | Cover-More Insurance Services Pty Ltd agent of insurer | 21 days |
| Fast Cover | Certain Underwriters at Lloyd's | Lloyd's | — | 25 days |
| Insure&Go | Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Company Limited | APRA authorised | Europ Assistance Australia Pty Ltd binding authority | 21 days |
| Medibank Travel Insurance | Zurich Australian Insurance Limited | APRA authorised | Travel Insurance Partners Pty Limited authorised representative | 21 days |
| RACV Travel Insurance | Tokio Marine & Nichido Fire Insurance Co., Ltd | APRA authorised | — | 21 days |
| Tick Travel Insurance | Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Company Limited | APRA authorised | Europ Assistance Australia Pty Ltd binding authority | 14 days |
| Travel Insurance Direct (TID) | Allianz Australia Insurance Limited | APRA authorised | — | — |
| Travel Insurance Saver | Lloyd's of London | Lloyd's | Chase Underwriting Solutions Pty Ltd authorised representative | 14 days |
| Webjet Travel Insurance | Zurich Australian Insurance Limited | APRA authorised | Cover-More Insurance Services Pty Ltd authorised representative | 21 days |
| Zoom Travel Insurance | HDI Global Speciality SE | APRA authorised | Coffre-Fort Pty Ltd authorised representative | 14 days |
Brands that share a distributor
The insurer carries the risk; the distributor sells the policy and usually handles the claim. Where two brands share both, they are generally two front ends to one product.
| Distributor | Brands | Which |
|---|---|---|
| Cover-More Insurance Services Pty Ltd | 2 | cover-more, webjet |
| Europ Assistance Australia Pty Ltd | 2 | insureandgo, tick |
| Travel Insurance Partners Pty Limited | 2 | budget-direct, medibank |
The sentence behind each insurer
Every fact here was read out of a document and is published with the sentence it came from, so it can be checked against the insurer's own words rather than taken on trust.
- Australia Post Travel Insurance Zurich Australian Insurance Limited
The insurer of this product is Zurich Australian Insurance Limited (ZAIL), ABN 13 000 296 640, AFS Licence Number 232507
Read from its PDS: the document, rule issuer.declared.
- Budget Direct Travel Insurance Zurich Australian Insurance Limited
The insurer of this product is Zurich Australian Insurance Limited (ZAIL), ABN 13 000 296 640, AFSL 232507
Read from its PDS: the document, rule issuer.declared.
- Cover-More Zurich Australian Insurance Limited
The insurer of this product is Zurich Australian Insurance Limited (ZAIL), ABN 13 000 296 640, AFSL 232507
Read from its PDS: the document, rule issuer.declared.
- Fast Cover Certain Underwriters at Lloyd's
Fast Cover Travel Insurance is promoted by Fast Cover and insured by Certain Underwriters at Lloyd’s
Read from its PDS: the document, rule issuer.lloyds.
- Insure&Go Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Company Limited
The insurer of this insurance is: Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Company Limited (“MSI”) ABN 49 000 525 637 AFSL Number 240816 Level 26, 135 King St, Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia Please refer to the FSG section of this document for information on the services provided and the remuneration received, or to be received, by Europ Assistance as the distributor and…
Read from its PDS: the document, rule issuer.declared.
- Medibank Travel Insurance Zurich Australian Insurance Limited
The Insurer of this product is Zurich Australian Insurance Limited (ZAIL), ABN 13 000 296 640, AFS Licence Number 232507
Read from its PDS: the document, rule issuer.declared.
- RACV Travel Insurance Tokio Marine & Nichido Fire Insurance Co., Ltd
This insurance is issued by Us, Tokio Marine & Nichido Fire Insurance Co., Ltd. (Tokio Marine & Nichido) ABN 80 000 438 291, AFSL 246548
Read from its PDS: the document, rule issuer.declared.
- Tick Travel Insurance Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Company Limited
The insurer of this insurance is: Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Company Limited (“MSI”) ABN 49 000 525 637, AFSL 240816 Level 26, 135 King St, Sydney, NSW 2000, Throughout this PDS the issuer/insurer is referred to as we, us, our
Read from its PDS: the document, rule issuer.declared.
- Travel Insurance Direct (TID) Allianz Australia Insurance Limited
This insurance is underwritten by Allianz Australia Insurance Limited ABN 15 000 122 850 AFS Licence 234708 Level 16, 10 Carrington St Sydney, NSW 2000 Prepared on 22 July 2026 TIDTI / IMP3847
Read from its PDS: the document, rule issuer.declared.
- Travel Insurance Saver Lloyd's of London
Chase has under binding authority authorised by certain underwriters at Lloyd’s of London (Insurer) to act on its behalf in arranging, issuing, varying, cancelling and providing general advice in relation to the Insurer’s travel insurance products
Read from its PDS: the document, rule issuer.lloyds.
- Webjet Travel Insurance Zurich Australian Insurance Limited
The insurer of this product is Zurich Australian Insurance Limited (ZAIL), ABN 13 000 296 640, AFSL 232507
Read from its PDS: the document, rule issuer.declared.
- Zoom Travel Insurance HDI Global Speciality SE
Your policy is underwritten by HDI Global Speciality SE - Australia (ABN 58 129 395 544, AFSL458776) (the insurer)
Read from its PDS: the document, rule issuer.labelled.
What is not here
Benefit limits per plan and the excess are not read. A PDS states its limits in a table with one column per plan; flattened to text those columns interleave, so a figure cannot be tied to the plan it belongs to. The same documents carry worked examples full of plausible dollar amounts that a looser rule would publish as policy limits. The excess is chosen by the buyer at purchase, so there is no single excess for a policy.
These brands could not be read at all:
- 1Cover — The policy documents page (https://www.1cover.com.au/policydetails/) returns 200 but lists no document links in its HTML; the PDS is loaded by a script after the page renders. Reading it would need a headless browser, which this dataset's pipeline does not use.
- World2Cover — As 1Cover: https://www.world2cover.com.au/policydocumentation answers 200 with no document links in the HTML.
- Allianz Travel Insurance — www.allianz.com.au returns 403 at its CDN to our user agent, including on robots.txt. Allianz Australia Insurance Limited is a significant travel underwriter, so its absence from the brand list understates the concentration this dataset measures, and that is said where the figures are published.
- NRMA Travel Insurance — Returned 403 Forbidden to our user agent.
- Qantas Travel Insurance — The page did not respond within the timeout on the day checked. Not a refusal; just not yet resolved to a document.
- Southern Cross Travel Insurance — A PDS link was found but its href resolved to a malformed URL mixing the site path with an Azure CDN hostname, so no document URL could be pinned with confidence.
The data
underwriters.json: every row above, with the quoted sentence, the rule that found it and the register check.policies.json: every fact read from each brand's documents, including the cooling-off period, target market and document dates.rules.json: what each extraction rule id means.- What the travel insurance class pays out, and every authorised general insurer.
Source: APRA register of general insurance, used under CC BY 3.0 AU. Source: ASIC Australian Financial Services Licensee register, used under CC BY 3.0 AU. The documents themselves are the insurers' copyright; only the short sentence each fact was read from is reproduced here.
Deep Almanac is a secondary source and this page is provided for general information and reference. It is not financial, investment, legal, valuation, educational or other professional advice, and it is not a substitute for checking the original source. This dataset holds no travel insurance premiums, because no price list is published for them: it reports what travellers pay in premiums and what comes back as claims across the whole class of business, what each policy covers, and who is authorised to underwrite it. It cannot tell you what a trip would cost to insure, and a class-wide ratio says nothing about any one insurer or trip. You are responsible for any decision you or your software makes in reliance on this page. See our terms of use.