Best Bike Insurance Provider

I've been wondering this recently and been searching through a few different threads.

M&S home insurance seems to be about the best.

I've done a building and contents qoutes, maximum value of any single item £4k unless otherwise stated which covers most bikes.

Premium was £205 for standard cover and £298 for premium.

Does anyway know if the away from home cover included theft, for example if a watch was stolen from a safe at a hotel or if a bike was stolen off a lockable roof rack?

If you're just after something for it getting nicked or damaged outside of use, house insurance generally works out better value for money by far, and they tend to quibble less.

Note that some won't cover it if it's nicked from a car, and regardless it has to be locked and secured wherever it is. If the bike's on a car rack you may have trouble with almost any insurance with theft unless it's proven to be secured well or nicked in front of your nose.

And whilst I can't say for sure about M&S cover, usually away from home cover is for loss (theft) and damage (accidental* / third party). * - accidental may or may not be covered. Generally exclusions are any wear and tear, damage through use, mechanical failures and damage during maintenance.

Just ensure the cover for away from home items is enough and check anything they say specifically about bikes. Some have additional bits for bikes away from home. Mine does, but the personal items section doesn't exclude bikes so not sure. May add the bike bit on mine to be sure.

How about for those of us that rent property? Bikes aren't covered in my tenants contents policy from Endsleigh...

holiver wrote:

How about for those of us that rent property? Bikes aren't covered in my tenants contents policy from Endsleigh...

Student? and are you doing your own contents or it's just provided by the landlord? (hate it when they do that. Worse value of all as they end up with expensive block insurances with poor contents cover. Fine for the bricks & mortar but contents should be up to you).

Endsleigh usually have specific stuff for bikes. For students though I remember it sucked. Back in my day they covered about £100 for the bike, though that was some time ago now!

If you can get your own contents, shop around, and yeah all of the above just applies to contents. You don't have to be a home owner.

frogrocket wrote:

When it came around to renewal I went over the fine print and found out they took off 10% of the value for every year since you got the bike.

Seeing as I'd had the bike 10 years, I think you can do the maths. Needless to say I cancelled.

You need to be more specific with that - if for example they reduce the value by 10% of the original value per year, then yes after 10 years they value it at £0. However, if they reduce the value by 10% of the previous value, that's maybe an acceptable amount of depreciation and will never reach 0. So if the bike cost 1000 new, they will then value it at 900 after 1 year, 810 after 2 years, 729 after 3 years etc giving 348.68 after the 10 years.

But bike insurance is something I will be sorting out as well. I also need to cover a number of electronic items, hopefully all with one policy if I can. I do hate insurance though - too many people out there scamming the companies mean insurance for almost everything is so expensive.

There was a thread on cycleguard a while back and I read through the policy doc in detail just out of curiosity. It was utterly rubbish with common terms like "bicycle", "removable accessory" and "abandonment" defined to mean different things than the meaning the average person would expect.

Obviously always read the terms, but in this instance I think they were clearly on the edge of over selling and misleading the consumer.

I had a GT RTS nicked in York about, erm 13ish years ago.

I was covered for £1500 (a lot back then) on my contents

The insurace wanted to supply me with a GT LTS (and its weekly pivot bearing change), so they supplied the bike of my choice which was a Mount Vision.
It was easy, no hassle, and that was Skandia.

Bear in mind that your initial contact is normally with a computer controlled mouth breather.
On escalation you often get someone with half a brain at least.

Indeed. For dedicated insurance, work out how much the premiums are, how much the bike is worth, and how likely/frequently the bike will get nicked. Then work out how much you'd end up with if you just saved the money. If bike is nicked, use that to buy a new one, if not, hell, buy a new one anyway

GSP1984 wrote:

M&S Insurance has all changed now...

Just done a qoute and the premium is now £600+ a year rather than £200ish when I did the quote last time.

They now ask if you have a bike worth over £1k and you have to declare it.

Must have been a recent change - picked my insurance up with M&S last week (kicks in late December) and there was no mention of declaring bikes over £1000. It even used bikes in the example of £4000 worth of cover. Just looking at their website and I see the change has been made though. Wonder if I'm still on the old cover.............

I was just about to insure my bikes through M&S and the premium has increased significantly with the new process of registering each bike separately. Does anyone know of an insurer who offer a similar policy to the M&S of old?

deadkenny wrote:

£600 a year! Just put the money in savings. A few years and you've got a new bike. Just a gamble then on whether you're likely to get bike nicked more frequently than 2 or 3 years at a time.

+1 buy a couple of DECENT LOCKS for added security.. insurance seems to of gone silly now for everything...

Interesting about the M&S cover, mine just renewed (17 a month for full cover, cant believe the above poster is paying 30!!!) nothing was mentioned in T&Cs so should still be covered the same, i.e. any bike up to £4k.

Obviously they've had loads of bikers sign up to their policy, had a butt load of claims as bike theft has gone through the roof and now they want to lighten their books.

Briggo wrote:

Interesting about the M&S cover, mine just renewed (17 a month for full cover, cant believe the above poster is paying 30!!!) nothing was mentioned in T&Cs so should still be covered the same, i.e. any bike up to £4k.

Obviously they've had loads of bikers sign up to their policy, had a butt load of claims as bike theft has gone through the roof and now they want to lighten their books.

Its only additional £13 a month :? Hardly an 'unbelievable' amount extra. The £30 a month is full buildings and contents, including accidental damage at home and away, with a few other bits of extra cover... So not just bike cover. Included in that price Is quite a lot of high value/risk items individually listed, and a watch collection worth considerably more than a couple of orange fives in the garage.

So £30 is quite reasonable in the grand scheme of things considering what you can pay.

I found the ETA to be the most reasonably priced when I insured just under a year ago. No hassles when I had to make a claim too.