I've just spent over a week trying to sort out travel insurance for a trip I'm starting shortly and the byzantine complexities of it had me wondering whether it's designed that way so they always have a get-out clause. I must have gone through the small print of something like 30 companies and looked through the headline offerings of over 50 only to fall foul of some restriction or other. It's a good job I'm (relatively) healthy otherwise I don't think any of the companies would have insured me.

These were all UK companies so some of the small print is no doubt different from what the US businesses include but with annual policies virtually all of them would cover you for any number of trips in a year as long as no individual trip was longer than 31 days. And you had to start and finish from home. Just coming back into the country didn't count, you had to return home.

Neither would they cover you for doing anything. If you wanted to do anything more complicated than sleeping it had to be on their approved activity list. Some companies lists were long, comprehensive (over 400 activities in one case) and banded for risk (and premium). Others had very short lists hidden well down in the small print. A number of them had exclusions for stuff I would regard as normal life. For example, we have a flat in the French Alps at just on 2000m altitude. Some of the companies considered walking at over 2000m as a high risk activity and specifically excluded it. That would mean I'd be covered if I walked down the hill to the lower supermarket but not if I walked up the hill to the nearest one.

Some companies would spread the geographical list into UK, Europe, Rest of world inc USA or Rest of world ex USA. Others wanted a specific list of countries. I rang up one of them, a specialist travel insurer, who would cover me for Morocco, Western Sahara, Senegal and a whole load of other West African countries but not Mauritania. He admitted he'd never even heard of the place and asked whether it was in Africa.When I asked how I was supposed to get from WS to Senegal all I got was "sorry, it's not on the list". His "list" wasn't a drop down one but country names he had to type in manually. His computer said no because he was spelling it M-O-R-A... If this is what you get from a "specialist" what hope have you got from the rest of them.

And as for age ...! I tried to get a quote from Saga, a company that promotes itself as an over 50's specialist. They wouldn't insure me because, at 66, I was ... too old. I rang them up before realising this and said I was trying to get a travel quote for a possibly risky activity and they replied "yes we do cover cruises". Probably two thirds of the insurance companies I tried had a cut off at 65. Saga have since sent me three "how did we do" survey requests!

The other (and last - I've gone on long enough) thing was that there was very little connection between cover level and price. You'd think the cheap ones would only cover you for breathing and you'd pay through the nose for base jumping or similar but as far as I could see you were just as likely to get a huge approved list + massive medical cover from a cheap company as an expensive one. It was just a case of finding one where the random variation in their terms and conditions all worked in my favour. When I found one it turned out to be one at the cheaper end.