A good friend of mine arrived this morning all the way from sunny Australia. He's here for three weeks holiday, so I'd offered to lend him one of my motorcycles to tour around Europe. Only fair when he lent me his when I was in Sydney last month! It's another biker thing - we tend to lend bikes out far more often than people do cars in my experience, but then that might be because a lot of us have more than one. Or maybe it's because we're all so lovely *grin*
It seemed such a simple idea - lend him the bike (GPz900R if you're interested), sort out some insurance, and Bob's your Uncle. But no, that would have been too simple. I tried to add him to my insurance: you can have a multi-bike or multi-rider policy, but not both. He tried to arrange insurance for himself: the insurers wouldn't even quote because he doesn't have a UK driving licence. This wasn't a problem last time he was here 6 years ago, but it is now. In desperation we looked at motorcycle hire: eeek - extortionate!
We drank more tea and phoned some more. The biggest bike insurers in the country didn't want to know. We were starting to get a tad worried. I called my insurers back - they had quoted very high earlier on, but by now it was looking good. We asked about the non-UK driving licence thing: they double-checked and bingo! We were go! The cost was horrible, the bike had to come off my main policy and on to a new one, it had to be in my name as the registered keeper with my friend as a named driver, but we had insurance - phew. Of course my no-claims discount couldn't be applied to more than one policy (why is that?), so the cost for third party fire & theft was more than my usual fully comprehensive policy for two bikes, but it was insurance at last.
I sent my friend off on the GPz and headed off to work, reflecting on how something seemingly so simple could turn out to be so complicated. But then life, and definitely insurance, is like that.
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