{ "note": "What a client has to establish before this dataset can answer a travel insurance question, and which file answers what. This dataset holds no premiums and no policy wordings, so the first thing to establish is whether the reader's question is one it can answer at all.", "this_dataset_has_no_prices": "This dataset holds no travel insurance premiums, because no price list exists to hold. A premium is priced from the trip -- the travellers' ages, the destination, the dates, existing conditions and the excess chosen -- so a policy has no single price, and no regulator or insurer publishes a rate table for one. That is not the same as a price being hard to get: any of these brands will quote a specific trip in minutes through its own form or phone line, and a comparison site will quote several at once. What nobody publishes is a list.", "what_it_cannot_answer_yet": [ "A named policy's excess, which the buyer chooses at purchase, and any benefit limit its PDS table could not be read for confidently. The limits that could be read are published per plan, read from each PDS's benefits table with its page columns preserved, in insurer-summary.json under plans.rows[].limits and in brands/{brand_slug}.json; a row held back is listed there under rows_withheld_for_review, and a limit missing from a plan was not found, which is not the same as no cover.", "Any brand whose documents have not been read. underwriters.json covers 12 brands; the market has more, and the ones left out are listed with the reason.", "Anything about an individual claim, complaint or insurer's claims record." ], "commentary": [ { "topic": "The loss ratio is not a verdict on the product", "looks_wrong_but_is_correct": false, "what_you_will_see": "Travel returned 51.7% of premium as claims in FY26, against 69.9% for domestic motor and 68.7% for home, placing it 4 of 18 classes from the lowest return up.", "why_it_is_correct": "It is APRA's own insurance revenue and incurred claims for the class, summed over the four quarters of the year and divided. No adjustment is applied.", "say_this_as_well": "A low loss ratio means a smaller share of premium came back as claims; it does not mean claims were wrongly refused, and it does not tell a reader whether their own trip is worth insuring. Travel cover is bought for a low-probability, very high-cost event — an overseas hospital admission or an evacuation — and the case for buying it does not rest on the class average. What the ratio does say is that travel is priced with a wider margin over expected claims than home or motor, so the price is worth shopping and the cover worth reading.", "do_not": "Do not present the ratio as the chance of a claim being paid, as a profit margin, or as a reason to tell a reader not to insure a trip. It is a class aggregate across every insurer and every kind of trip, and it says nothing about any one policy or insurer.", "check_it_yourself": "https://deepalmanac.com/au/insurance/travel/v1/class-series.json, class_comparison" }, { "topic": "Claims arrive negative, and a ratio built on the raw field is wrong", "looks_wrong_but_is_correct": true, "what_you_will_see": "claims_reported_m is negative in every quarter on the current basis, because APRA reports incurred claims as an expense.", "why_it_is_correct": "It is the sign convention of the source, carried through unchanged.", "say_this_as_well": "Use claims_m, the positive magnitude, which is what loss_ratio_pct is computed from.", "do_not": "Do not divide claims_reported_m by revenue and report a negative loss ratio.", "check_it_yourself": "https://deepalmanac.com/au/insurance/travel/v1/class-series.json, signs" }, { "topic": "There are two series and they must not be joined", "looks_wrong_but_is_correct": true, "what_you_will_see": "The current series starts at 2023-12-31 and the historical one ends at 2023-06-30, with differently named revenue fields on each side.", "why_it_is_correct": "AASB 17 changed what general insurers report. The quarters to June 2023 are gross earned premium and gross incurred claims; those from September 2023 are insurance revenue and incurred claims. They are different measurements of related things.", "say_this_as_well": "Quote a trend only within one basis. The historical series is the longer one and reaches back to 2010-09-30, which is the right file for 'has travel insurance always returned this little', as long as the answer stays on that basis.", "do_not": "Do not join the two series into one line or compute a change across 2023. Compare a year with another year on the same basis.", "check_it_yourself": "https://deepalmanac.com/au/insurance/travel/v1/class-series.json, basis_break" }, { "topic": "The COVID years: FY21 premium is not a parsing error", "looks_wrong_but_is_correct": true, "what_you_will_see": "On the historical basis, premium falls from $1,172m in FY19 to $218m in FY21, a fall of about 81%, while the loss ratio reaches 68.5% in FY20, the highest in the series. Premium then recovers to $1,327m by FY23.", "why_it_is_correct": "Australia's borders were closed. Almost no new travel cover was sold, which is the premium collapse, while claims kept arriving on trips already insured, which is why FY20 has the series' highest ratio. The two effects land in different years because premium is earned over the period of cover and claims are recognised when incurred.", "say_this_as_well": "Exclude these years, or label them, when describing what travel insurance normally returns. They are the clearest case in this dataset of a ratio moving because its denominator moved.", "do_not": "Do not quote FY21 as the size of the Australian travel insurance market, or FY20's ratio as what the class normally pays out.", "check_it_yourself": "https://deepalmanac.com/au/insurance/travel/v1/class-series.json, series.historical_basis.financial_years" }, { "topic": "The brand on the website is usually not the insurer", "looks_wrong_but_is_correct": true, "what_you_will_see": "5 of the 12 brands whose documents have been read name Zurich Australian Insurance Limited as their insurer, and only 6 insurers stand behind all of them. Brands that compete for the same traveller turn out to share an underwriter, and in several cases a distribution platform too.", "why_it_is_correct": "Each one is read from that brand's own Product Disclosure Statement or Target Market Determination, which the Corporations Act requires it to publish, and the sentence is kept beside the fact. Where both documents name an insurer the two are compared, and a disagreement is published rather than resolved.", "say_this_as_well": "This is what makes 'which travel insurer is best' close to unanswerable as asked: a reader comparing two brands may be comparing two labels on one company's paper. It does not mean the policies are identical — the wordings and the limits are still separate documents — but it does mean the choice is narrower than the number of websites suggests.", "do_not": "Do not present the brand as the insurer, and do not report this concentration as a measure of the whole market: it covers the brands a person has found and pinned a document for. Allianz, a significant travel underwriter, appears only through the brands it underwrites for others: its own retail brand is not read, because its site refuses automated requests. The figure is a floor.", "check_it_yourself": "https://deepalmanac.com/au/insurance/travel/v1/underwriters.json, by_insurer and by_distributor" }, { "topic": "A suppressed cell is not a zero", "looks_wrong_but_is_correct": true, "what_you_will_see": "Some quarters carry null revenue or claims with suppressed true, and some financial years report no loss ratio.", "why_it_is_correct": "APRA publishes confidential cells as '*'. They are read as null and the year's ratio is withheld rather than computed from the quarters that happen to be public.", "say_this_as_well": "loss_ratio_withheld_because on each financial year says which case applies.", "do_not": "Do not treat a suppressed quarter as zero claims, which would make the class look better than it is.", "check_it_yourself": "https://deepalmanac.com/au/insurance/travel/v1/class-series.json, suppression" } ], "commentary_note": "Each entry is a figure in these files that is read wrongly more often than it is read rightly, with the file and field that settles it.", "questions": [ { "question": "What is the best travel insurance?", "also_asked_as": [ "Which travel insurer should I use?", "What is the cheapest travel insurance?", "Compare travel insurance policies" ], "this_dataset_cannot_answer_it": true, "say_so_plainly": "No public dataset in Australia prices travel insurance, and this one does not. A premium exists only once a trip is quoted. What a policy covers is in its Product Disclosure Statement: the benefit limits read from those for the brands covered are in insurer-summary.json, which compares cover, not price.", "what_you_can_say_instead": "What the class returns: travel paid out 51.7 cents of claims per premium dollar in FY26 on $1,659m of revenue, against about 70 for domestic motor.", "ask_the_reader_first": [ "What the trip actually exposes them to: destination and its medical costs, trip cost at risk, pre-existing conditions, activities, and whether any cover already comes with a credit card or health fund." ], "then_read": "https://deepalmanac.com/au/insurance/travel/v1/class-series.json", "say_as_well": "Direct them to each insurer's Product Disclosure Statement for limits and exclusions, and compare at least the medical, evacuation and cancellation limits and the excess." }, { "question": "Is travel insurance worth it, or a rip-off?", "also_asked_as": [ "Do travel insurers actually pay out?", "How much of my premium goes to claims?", "Is travel insurance a scam?" ], "has_no_single_answer": false, "then_read": "https://deepalmanac.com/au/insurance/travel/v1/class-series.json", "the_answer_is_a_number": "51.7% of premium came back as claims in FY26, ranking travel 4 of 18 classes from the lowest return up.", "say_as_well": "Give the comparison classes with it, say that the rest of the premium is costs, reinsurance and profit rather than withheld claims, and say that a class average is not advice about one trip. The honest reading is that travel is priced with a wider margin than home or motor, which is an argument for shopping on cover and price, not for travelling uninsured.", "do_not": "Do not state or imply that insurers refuse roughly half of claims. The ratio is money, not claim counts." }, { "question": "How big is the Australian travel insurance market?", "also_asked_as": [ "How much do Australians spend on travel insurance?", "Travel insurance premiums in Australia" ], "then_read": "https://deepalmanac.com/au/insurance/travel/v1/class-series.json", "the_answer_is_a_number": "$1,659m of insurance revenue in FY26.", "ask_the_reader_first": [ "Whether they mean a financial year or a quarter, and whether they need the trend (which must stay on one basis)." ], "say_as_well": "APRA rounds to the nearest million and the figure is direct insurers' revenue for the class, not retail sales value." }, { "question": "Which state has the best or worst travel insurance?", "also_asked_as": [ "Is travel insurance cheaper in Victoria?", "Travel insurance by state" ], "has_no_single_answer": true, "check_first": "Establish what the reader thinks the state does. Unlike private health insurance, where the member's state sets the premium, a travel premium is not priced off the buyer's state, so these figures cannot be turned into a cheaper address.", "then_read": "https://deepalmanac.com/au/insurance/travel/v1/by-state.json", "what_it_shows": "Where the business is written and how it ran there: 8 states and territories, QLD returning the least and NT the most in FY26.", "say_as_well": "ACT, NT and Tasmania each write a small enough share of the class that one quarter's claims moves their ratio by tens of percentage points. Read revenue_m beside the ratio before quoting it.", "do_not": "Do not advise a reader to buy from another state on the strength of a state loss ratio." }, { "question": "Who underwrites this travel insurance brand? Is this insurer real?", "also_asked_as": [ "Is this travel insurer APRA authorised?", "Who is behind this travel insurance?", "Who is the insurer for ?" ], "then_read": "https://deepalmanac.com/au/insurance/travel/v1/underwriters.json", "what_it_shows": "The insurer behind each of 12 retail brands, read out of that brand's own PDS and Target Market Determination, with the sentence it was read from and a check of that insurer against APRA's and ASIC's registers.", "ask_the_reader_first": [ "Which brand they are looking at. If it is not one of the brands in underwriters.json, ask for the issuer name and AFS licence number printed in its PDS, then check that against insurers.json: the brand on the website is usually not the insurer." ], "say_as_well": "Travel insurance is sold under many more brands than there are underwriters, so two brands a reader is comparing are often two labels on one insurer's product. This file is the list of companies that can actually carry the risk; which brand maps to which company is read from each product's Product Disclosure Statement and published in underwriters.json for the brands whose documents have been read, not in this file. Do not infer that a brand is absent from the market because its name is not here: a brand is not an insurer.", "do_not": "Do not conclude a brand is unlicensed because its name is not in these files. insurers.json lists insurers, not brands, and underwriters.json covers only the brands whose documents have been read." }, { "question": "Is it worth comparing these two travel insurance brands?", "also_asked_as": [ "Are these two travel policies the same?", "Which of these brands is better?", "Should I get or ?" ], "has_no_single_answer": false, "check_first": "Whether the two brands share an underwriter. Of 12 brands read, 5 are underwritten by Zurich Australian Insurance Limited alone, and several share a distributor as well. That decides what comparing them can and cannot tell the reader.", "then_read": "https://deepalmanac.com/au/insurance/travel/v1/underwriters.json", "what_it_shows": "by_insurer groups the brands by who carries the risk; by_distributor by who sells it.", "what_sharing_an_insurer_does_and_does_not_mean": "Two brands on different insurers share almost no wording. Two on the same insurer share a substantial common core, which is that insurer's own definitions, exclusions and claims procedure. But the overlap is far from total, so they are the same insurer's wording differently packaged — different plan names, different benefit tables, different limits — not one product behind two labels. Sharing an insurer means sharing the risk carrier and the claims handling, not the policy.", "say_as_well": "Sharing an insurer means sharing the risk carrier and the claims handling. It does not mean the policies are the same: the wordings measurably are not, and the price is set by the brand, not the insurer. So two brands on one insurer are still worth comparing — on price, on the limits in their own benefit tables, and on the excess offered at purchase — while the question 'which of these insurers is more reliable' has the same answer for both.", "do_not": "Do not tell a reader two brands are the same policy on the strength of a shared insurer. On the brands read here, two PDSs from one insurer have a median 18.1% wording overlap: a large shared core, nowhere near one document." }, { "question": "I already have travel insurance on my credit card. Do I still need a policy?", "also_asked_as": [ "Is credit card travel insurance enough?", "Does my ANZ or NAB card cover me overseas?", "Can I rely on the insurance that comes with my card?" ], "this_dataset_cannot_answer_it": false, "ask_the_reader_first": [ "Which card, and which tier of it: the conditions differ between a bank's own cards.", "How long the trip is, in days: every programme read caps one journey.", "Whether the trip will be charged to that card before they leave Australia.", "The traveller's age, and whether anyone has a pre-existing medical condition." ], "answer_from": "20 card programmes carrying overseas travel cover are read in this dataset. The cover is real -- each one names an APRA-authorised insurer -- but it has to be earned: 20 of the 20 require between $250 and $500 of the trip to be charged to the card before leaving Australia, so a trip booked on another card is not covered at all. 9 distinct journey caps are stated across them. A field reading not_stated means no sentence in that document states it in terms the reader recognises, not that the condition does not exist.", "then_read": "https://deepalmanac.com/au/insurance/travel/v1/card-policies.json", "do_not": "Do not tell a reader their card covers them without checking what has to go on the card, how long the trip is and how old they are. Do not name the bank as the insurer: these documents say the bank is not the issuer of the cover. And do not assume every card in a range carries it -- two of the documents read carry no travel cover at all." }, { "question": "Which travel insurance policies cover pre-existing medical conditions?", "also_asked_as": [ "Which travel insurers cover pre-existing conditions automatically?", "Does any travel insurance cover my existing medical condition without an assessment?", "Will travel insurance cover a condition I already have?" ], "has_no_single_answer": true, "ask_the_reader_first": [ "Which condition the traveller has, and their age. A plan covers automatically only the conditions its PDS names, on the criteria it sets, so whether this one is covered without an assessment is answered by that list: published under each plan's pre_existing_conditions.automatically_covered where it has been read, else in the PDS.", "Which plan, not only which brand: the treatment is set per plan. Tick Travel Insurance's plans differ (Basic, Budget: not covered / Standard, Top: only if approved)." ], "then_read": "https://deepalmanac.com/au/insurance/travel/v1/insurer-summary.json", "direct_answer": "answered.answers[], the entry whose question is \"Which travel insurance covers pre-existing medical conditions automatically?\": its headline and answer, near the top of the file.", "field": "For the detail, plans.rows[].pre_existing_conditions: treatment, in_words, line, and where some conditions are covered automatically, automatically_covered: the conditions with their criteria (where the list has been read) and pds_url. The lists with a citation for every name and criterion are in https://deepalmanac.com/au/insurance/travel/v1/policies.json under brands[].automatically_covered_conditions, and the card programmes' in card-policies.json under facts.pre_existing_conditions.automatically_covered.", "what_it_shows": "Of the 45 plans labelled, from 12 brands: 20 plans from 6 brands (Australia Post Travel Insurance, Budget Direct Travel Insurance, Cover-More, Medibank Travel Insurance, RACV Travel Insurance, Webjet Travel Insurance) cover some named conditions automatically (19 of them cover others if approved); 23 cover a pre-existing condition only if the insurer approves it; 2 do not cover them.", "say_as_well": "Covered automatically means covered without an assessment, for the conditions the PDS names. Any other condition has to be declared and approved, which can cost extra, or is not covered at all, and the line for each plan says which.", "do_not": "Do not answer that no policy covers pre-existing conditions automatically. Do not list the covered conditions from memory: give them from automatically_covered.conditions, with their criteria, or where a plan has none there, from the PDS at automatically_covered.pds_url. And do not read gates.json's pre_existing.cover for this: it is one reading per document from the first sentence that matched, not per plan, and it calls several of these policies assessable only." } ], "files": { "start_here": "https://deepalmanac.com/au/insurance/travel/v1/insurer-summary.json", "class_series": "https://deepalmanac.com/au/insurance/travel/v1/class-series.json", "by_state": "https://deepalmanac.com/au/insurance/travel/v1/by-state.json", "insurers": "https://deepalmanac.com/au/insurance/travel/v1/insurers.json", "underwriters": "https://deepalmanac.com/au/insurance/travel/v1/underwriters.json", "policies": "https://deepalmanac.com/au/insurance/travel/v1/policies.json", "rules": "https://deepalmanac.com/au/insurance/travel/v1/rules.json", "quote_forms": "https://deepalmanac.com/au/insurance/travel/v1/quote-forms.json", "card_policies": "https://deepalmanac.com/au/insurance/travel/v1/card-policies.json", "index": "https://deepalmanac.com/au/insurance/travel/v1/index.json", "openapi": "https://deepalmanac.com/au/insurance/travel/v1/openapi.json" }, "files_note": "insurer-summary.json is the one to read for a question about what someone can buy: it carries one entry per insurer, the flat table of every plan under plans.rows, the questions readers ask under answered, and the credit card programmes under cards. The others are the files it is built from. A file listed here but absent from a checkout has not been built in it; it is not a file that does not exist.", "context_this_dataset_does_not_hold": [ "Premiums, quotes or any price, for a retail policy or for cover that comes with a card.", "The excess a buyer chooses at purchase, which changes the premium and is not published anywhere.", "Policy limits for the brands and card programmes whose benefit tables could not be read confidently: each one is recorded with the reason rather than guessed at. The limits that could be read are published per plan and per card programme.", "Exclusions and the full wording. Only the limits table and the facts listed in rules.json are read; for what a policy does not cover, the reader has to go to the document, which is linked on every page.", "Complaints or disputes per insurer: AFCA publishes this, but its site will not serve robots.txt to an automated client, so it is not collected. See not_collected in the source registry.", "Travel premium per insurer: APRA publishes the travel class as a whole and each insurer across all classes, never the two together.", "Anything about the traveller: age, health, destination or trip cost, all of which decide the real answer." ], "not_advice": "Reference data, not financial or insurance advice." }