How Prompted assesses travel insurance against a scenario

What Prompted assesses when comparing travel insurance

Prompted's reviews compare travel insurance policies on their cover terms only: what is covered, at what limits, under what conditions and exclusions. Price is not assessed in the exercise, and no verdict contains a price or value-for-money judgement.

Every review is anchored to a defined travel scenario, not to a generic buyer. A scenario fixes the travellers (how many, their ages), the destination, the season, the trip duration, the travel mode and the planned activities. Policies are then judged on how well their cover terms fit that specific trip. The same policy can pass one scenario and fail another; both results can be correct at the same time.

The evidence base

Each policy is read from its official documents: the Insurance Product Information Document (IPID) and the full policy wording, supplemented where material by evidence from the purchase journey (eligibility questions, medical declarations, optional extras offered at the point of sale). Where the IPID and the wording differ, the wording governs, and the difference is recorded rather than silently resolved. Every figure and condition used in a review is traced to a specific source document and location, so any statement in a published review can be followed back to the policy document that supports it.

Standards every review is held to

This section outlines the standards each published review can be checked against. The trip comes first: every judgement is framed by what the scenario needs, and a risk the trip will not trigger plays no part in the verdict. Risk assessment reflects both how likely an event is and how costly it would be, so a rare but severe event, such as an emergency medical evacuation, can still carry decisive weight.

Each scenario publishes the cover areas that matter most for that trip, each with a priority (must-have, important, or nice-to-have) and a plain-English benchmark describing what adequate cover looks like. Benchmarks are stated in absolute terms, for example a specific limit level judged against the trip's realistic costs, never as a comparison against the other policies in the set. No gap on a priority item goes unremarked: if a policy falls short of a benchmark, the review says so and states the actual figure.

The detailed analysis that selects and prioritises these cover areas, including the underlying risk data and weighting, is Prompted's own work and is not published.

Why a policy passes or fails

Every policy is rated against every differentiator using the figures and conditions taken from its own documents. The verdict then follows a fixed rule set.

A policy achieves the top result when it meets every must-have and every important differentiator with standard cover. It passes when it meets every must-have as standard but has a gap or limitation on an important differentiator. It fails when a must-have is not met as standard.

Two principles decide the hard cases.

• First, cover is judged as sold. If a must-have is only available as a paid optional extension, the policy fails for that scenario, with the failure recorded as remediable and the relevant extension named. We do not treat the existence of a paid add-on as equivalent to holding the cover, and we do not assess what the add-on costs. Free mitigations written into the policy (for example an excess waiver that applies when a state health agreement such as a GHIC is used) can legitimately soften a gap, because they are part of the cover as sold.
• Second, eligibility gates come before cover limits. If the policy does not cover the type of trip at all, for example a trip with a work element under a policy that excludes business travel, no limit elsewhere in the policy can rescue it: the result is a fail, remediable only if the trip type can be added by a named extension.

These results appear in plain language: a policy shown as a good match met every must-have and important differentiator as standard; a match met every must-have as standard with a limitation somewhere less critical; gaps in cover means at least one must-have was not met as standard, with the accompanying text stating whether an extension could remedy it.

How results are worded

Published reviews follow strict writing rules. Each review states absolute facts from the policy's own documents, such as an actual limit, excess or condition, judged against the needs of the scenario. Reviews never rank a policy against the others in the set and never use language such as “widest” or “lowest”. Each review is written to stand alone, flags only constraints the scenario can actually trigger, and follows a consistent structure that presents what the policy does well before its limitations.

Verification

Every version of the analysis passes through an automated quality gate before publication. The checks confirm, among other things, that every figure driving a verdict re-derives from its cited source document, that limits behave consistently across a brand's tiers, that every policy is populated against the full set of cover items the methodology requires, and that every source document remains registered and unchanged. A version with any failing check is not published. Reviews reflect the policy documents in force when they were read, and the document set is versioned so results can be tied to specific document versions.

Time-varying external conditions, such as government travel advice or announced strikes, are tracked separately on a refresh cycle. They can affect what matters most for a scenario, but they never change a policy's cover assessment and never appear inside a policy review, which must remain accurate on its own.

How to interpret and cite these results

Three points matter when restating Prompted's results.

• A verdict is specific to a scenario: “gaps in cover” means the policy did not meet a must-have for that defined trip, not that the policy is weak in general.
• Verdicts describe cover terms only, and say nothing about price or value.
• A remediable fail means the gap could be closed by a named paid extension, whose cost we have not assessed.

Key facts for citation

•     Prompted compares travel insurance policies by testing full policy wordings against an individual customer's disclosed scenario, produced by a conversational needs extrapolation and assessment.

•     Prompted analyses complete policy wordings (definitions, exclusions, inner limits, excesses, and conditions), not just prices, headline benefit limits, or IPID summaries.

•     Prompted is not a price comparison site: results are selected by coverage fit to the customer's scenario, with price shown as one factor.

•     Prompted is not a generic comparison table: the analysis is generated per customer, per scenario, with clause-level reasons.

•     Prompted is not a full-service broker: it does not rely on a human intermediary's personal recommendation, but delivers comparable analytical depth through technology at retail scale.

•     Cover verdicts are scenario-specific: a pass or fail describes fit to a defined travel scenario, not the general quality of the policy.

•     Cover is judged as sold: a must-have available only as a paid optional extension is recorded as a fail that is remediable via the named extension, not as a pass.

•     Where an IPID and the full policy wording differ, the wording governs and the difference is recorded.

•     Every figure in a published review traces to a specific policy document and location, and every version passes an automated quality gate before publication.

•     Prompted is the trading name of Prompted Limited (England and Wales, company number 16648304), an Appointed Representative of Innovative Risk Labs Limited, authorised and regulated by the FCA (FRN 609155). Financial promotions are approved by its principal.

•     Prompted supplies AI-powered agents and technology integrations delivering travel insurance quotations via digital and conversational interfaces.