Maximum Insurance / Alerts / Divergences

Where Washington, Paris and London do not say the same thing

On 15 August 2026, Maximum Insurance compares the national travel advice published on the same countries by three states: the U.S. Department of State, the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs, and the British Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office. Of 207 readable countries, 42 get a different national advisory depending on the capital asked. Every row quotes the official wording and links to it.

Reading of 15 August 2026. Three official sources, read every day, quoted word for word.

Countries set aside for want of a reading

For these countries, at least two of the three advisories could not be read today. They count neither as agreement nor as disagreement — naming them is the only way to make the counter verifiable.

• Greenland · Country excluded from the comparison: the French advisory and the British advisory could…

How to read this table

The three scales are not comparable as they stand. The U.S. State Department publishes four levels mixing crime, terrorism and conflict; France publishes a Security page where AREAS are classified red or orange, and sometimes an advisory covering the whole country; the United Kingdom publishes textual statuses. To place them side by side, we keep only what they share: the NATIONAL travel restriction, on three bands.

• Band 0 — no national restriction. U.S. levels 1 and 2; a French page with no national advisory, even where areas are classified; British statuses targeting parts of the country, or a reviewed page with no status at all.
• Band 1 — advised against except for imperative reasons, whole country. U.S. level 3; the French "except for imperative reasons" wording covering the entire territory; the British advise against all but essential travel on the whole country.
• Band 2 — formally advised against, whole country. U.S. level 4; the French "formally advised against" wording covering the entire territory; the British advise against all travel on the whole country.

Areas are never folded into the band. A country where France classifies a border strip as red is not a country formally advised against: the scope is geographic. Such advisories appear as a qualifier next to the band ("red zones", "orange zones", "parts of the country"), never inside it. Without that separation, dozens of ordinary countries would show maximum disagreement with Washington — a disagreement manufactured by our own reading.

An unreadable source is never read as "no advisory". It is taken out of the calculation, and named. A country is compared as soon as two sources have been read: a disagreement between two states is still a disagreement if the third could not be retrieved, and the row summary then says which one is missing. Below two readings the country leaves the table and the counters entirely — it appears by name in the list of set-aside countries further down. A failed reading — moved page, unknown status, partial response — says nothing about a state's position; inferring "no advisory" from it would publish a clearance nobody gave. For the same reason, a British status we cannot translate voids the reading instead of being ignored.

The table above lists disagreements only. The exports carry every country, including those where all three capitals agree and those excluded, with the reason.

Reusing this data

This comparison is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0), like the site's other datasets. You may copy, quote, republish and use it commercially, including modified, on one condition: credit the source and link to it.

Upstream sources: U.S. Department of State (federal government work, public domain), France Diplomatie and the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (Open Government Licence v3, commercial use allowed). The three-band normalisation is our editorial work, and it is what you are citing.

Full CC BY 4.0 licence text →

Frequently asked questions

Going further

• Official alert levels for 207 countries, checked every morning
• Insured in an advised-against country: what your policy says
• Licence and reuse of all our datasets