Insurance Claim for Stolen Bikes

Sanjay

Morning All,

Sadly on Thursday evening my 2 bikes (collectively worth about £5,000) were stolen from my garage during the night. Needless to say I am completely devastated.

I have made a claim through my home insurance with Aviva and the bikes were specifically itemised within our policy. Does anyone have any experience with such claims? I'm just wondering how long it will take to get a result. Are they likely to give me cash, or replace the bikes themselves?

Also, the garage is detached from our property, but right next to it. The metal door on the front of it is secured by a 3 bolt lock. The thieves accessed it by a wooden door on the side. I had put and extra mortis lock on this however they simply took the door off its hinges. The bikes themselves were lock together with a Abus Steeloflex lock though were not secured to the wall or floor, could this be a problem?

Thanks for any advice you can give me!

andy9964

You'll need a crime number from the police, probably over the phone as its unlikely they'll get aff their ar$es for something like this.
Check the small print, don't want to scare you, but it might say they need to be secured to something. But as they were locked up in a locked building, any decent ( and I use the word loosely) insurance company should pay out. Also check to see if you get 'new for old' or 'current market value'
Because of the value, they may send out an assessor to have a chat and a look where they were, just a formality really and should help get their true value.
Most companies these days will give you 'credit' to spend at one of their approved places, eg: £5k to spend at Evans, Decathlon or where ever. If you want the cash to spend at a LBS, they'll probably give you less, typically 5-10 %
Should be all sorted within around two weeks

Good luck

Sanjay

Thanks for the reply Andy.

I've already got the crime number and you were right; the police haven't come out to take a look. I've had a look through the documents and I couldn't see anything about having them locked to something its simply stipulates they must be 'locked securely' though that strikes me as fairly vague and open to interpretation. Fingers crossed for a positive outcome anyway.

diy

The way a lot of these policies are written, is they use fairly vague language in the text and then define what that means in the small print. A common one is abandonment, I.e if you abandon your bike it's not covered. Fair enough until you read what abandoned is defined as. It includes leaving it locked for more than 8 hours away from your home. So leave it locked in your mates garage over night and you have technically abandoned it.

Sanjay

Well its all good news!

The insurance company have paid out for the full value of both bikes. The were actually extremely helpful and have got things sorted extremely quickly for me. Thanks for the advice last week, much appreciated.