Mountain Biking Travel Insurance

Off to the Alps in September and needed to get the right travel insurance for the trip. I started with Dogtag who made it really difficult to decide what level of cover I needed, even after talking to them on the phone. We did have an interesting conversation about ‘downhill’ during which I said well yes of course I will be riding downhill some of the time as you can’t just ride uphill or flat forever!

Anyway I eventually went with Yellow Jersey who made it really easy by saying that any non-professional mountain biking was covered. Hopefully I won’t need to call on their services!

Snowcard seem reasonable too, although I’ve never had to call on them.

Yellow Jersey for me too. Was easy to sort out cover with minimal hassle.
I’m currently having to make a claim unfortunately, excess was only £60 on medical.

Around 10 years ago I had a dislocated shoulder whilst in the Alps and Dogtag insurance, with the size of the excess it wasn’t worth claiming the medical costs back. Plus when I looked this year, it was expensive and complicated to take a policy out.

I just got a week with pedalcover for me and my 16yr old son for £60. seems to cover everything you need medically, but seems you need a seperate cover for if your bike got nicked. Thats covered for me on my normal travel insurance I get with my bank.

Yellow Jersey.

Its simple cover. Covers travel insurance, plus all the daredevil mountain bike stuff.

Used them a month back for my riding trip to Slovenia and using them for my family holiday to Morzine tomorrow.

Reasonably priced too!

Last time round I went with Zurich and they were utter ****ing shit, for whatever that’s worth. Broke my arm in the runup to the trip, they maintained that because I could fly I could still go on a mountain biking holiday. Then once they finally caved on that, said I wasn’t covered because they have a specific exemption for “bicycle touring”, which I was not going to do.. Finally got the full payout but it took 2 years and towards the end it was just proper nonsense, promising one amount then sending another and taking a month to fix it. Imagine trying to deal with a company like that if you’re stuck in a french hospital

Never actually claimed with either Dogtag or Snocard but they at least give the impression of basic competence and, y’know, not being pretty much thieves.

Yellow Jersey here, never had to claim (touch wood). Slightly annoying to have to cover the whole trip even though the Morzine bit is only the first half.

Ended up breaking 4 ribs on day 2 but no point claiming anything. had a good two days though!

This is timely. I wouldn’t recommend Yellow Jersey again. The medical cover through Allianz iirc. Either way they don’t show any signs of paying out after 3 months.

I’ve used Insure and Go in the parts. Easy to configure the policy for different types of mountain biking and different levels of cover, but I’ve got no idea how good they are if you need to claim

@jamesoz ah bollocks. 5 of us have booked yellow jersey for a trip in November. Thought STW saw them as the safe bet.

@Onzadog It could be just my claim. It’s not especially big, around £500 and I’d paid the bill before claiming, they do stipulate you contact them before.
My error but rational decisions after landing on your head aren’t always forthcoming.

Yellow Jerseys Underwriters are Allianz. However Allianz outsource their claims to CSA and they are the ones who are the problem. Google for them.

They tried to not payout for Kevin been rescued by helicopter last year but in the end had to. Our complaint about how they handled it was knocked back so we we went to the Financial Ombudsman but before they made a decision Allianz had reviewed our complaint to CSA and upheld it in our favour.

Unfortunately most of the big insurers that are underwriting mtb holiday insurance use CSA.

Funnily enough 15 months after the accident we have recieved an email this week from CSA asking us if they can represent us in a third party claim against the Swiss company.

Ah, I had a phone call a while back from someone claiming to be from a company called CSA. It was an awful line and the lady was difficult to understand I assumed Spam or sales.
It’s a good reminder to contact them again.

This is the policy wording from Yellow Jersey.

The first sentence is CSAs get out clause. The second sentence is the consumers. In our instance we informed the next day.

Under the FCAs Consumer Duty regulations the policy wording needs to be achievable. If you can prove you informed them as soon as possible then it’s hard for them to get round it

Yellow Jersey, made a claim, spent 2 nights in hospital (over christmas) had to pay on my credit card (as they were shut christmas day) the money was back in my account a few days later.