Is Spot Bicycle Injury Insurance worth it? Yes! But…

[David Caplan]

If you are wondering whether or not the $79 (before 1/1/23) annual price for Spot 2023 Bicycle Injury Insurance is worth it, my answer would be definitely yes. My wife and I have both added Spot insurance to our OBRA memberships for the last 2 years, and plan to do so again. I was on the fence at first, but when a friend pointed out how much time we spend on our bikes, and how injuries are a part of that, he made it clear to me that we should sign up for it.

That turned out to be a very good decision, as last January my wife crashed cornering in some gravel while riding to the library and broke her femur. This required surgery and 2 nights in the hospital as well as a lot of rehab. We have high deductible health insurance, so having Spot to cover the $7k deductible was huge for us.

But, that said, it was not an easy experience, and it took months of wrangling documents, and many emails and phone calls to get everything that Spot covered, paid. While from what I've been told, smaller accidents have been dealt with with a minimum of hassle, dealing with this big claim was a big pain in the ass. I would like to share what we learned from our experience to hopefully spare others some of this pain.

1) Spot is not an insurance company, they are a broker, a middleman. We ended up dealing with Mutual of Omaha Special Claims division, with Spot in the middle assisting us. 

2) Spot makes it sound simple. Just upload your billing and insurance documents to their portal and get paid. We did all this only to be told by Mutual of Omaha that they needed completely different documents in very specific insurance formats. We spent a lot of time chasing down documents/billing statements. Compare this to our health insurance company, where we presented our insurance card at admittance and they took care of everything from there. 

3) The people we dealt with at Spot were helpful and attentive, but there was only so much they could do once we had to start dealing with MoO. MoO seemed set up just to make things difficult, like they were hoping we would eventually give up. Communication with them was through regular mail, with the same letter from them about working on our claim being received weekly for months. Documents had to be faxed to them at a special semi-secret number. Phone calls meant a long time placed on hold. Direct email with MoO was not possible. It got really frustrating!

4) Eventually I asked our representative at Spot why the burden of providing all the documents fell on us? Our health insurance company took care of this without us having to do anything, so why didn't Spot? They agreed, and said they would be improving this in the future. Let's hope that is true.

5) If you do sign up for Spot and have to deal with a major claim, find out early on EXACTLY which documents in which formats are going to be required by the insurance company handling the claim. And if you can, try to get Spot to help with getting these documents for the insurance company.

6) Accidents DO happen! $79 for a year of extra coverage for bicycle accidents is certainly well worth it if you spend as much time riding as most OBRA members do, and you have health insurance with a sizable deductible. 

Here's hoping we all stay safe, healthy and accident free.

[Brendan Quinlan]

Excellent information David, thank you for this. I was thinking about SPOT for myself and pretty sure I will still proceed, armed with your information. 

Thanks much!

Happy Holidays 

BQ 

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