Saturday 21 July 2007

The Kryptonite £1200 Anti Theft Offer under scrutiny.

So there you are, trawling through the D locks and chains at your local Halfords or Wal Mart or whatever and there you see it! A beacon of confidence in one's product, a shining example of a multinational corporation putting its money where its mouth is, fair warms the cockles of yer 'art guvnah. Of course, I am speaking of the fabled and oft quoted (by Kryptonite) "Kryptonite Anti Theft Offer, £1200, see inside for details". How could you possibly resist? I mean your bike gets nicked and Kryptonite pays up to £1200 towards a replacement right?


WRONG!


If you could actually open the packaging without security booting you out, you would see that the "Anti Theft Offer" is merely a pea with a large watermelon's jacket on. The "Offer" is to pay "up to" £1200 off your insurance excess. Don't have insurance? Ah, tough titty, you'll get bugger all then. You have insurance? Jolly good, well done, very sensible. Now read you insurance details, you'll more than likely find a clause in there that insists that you return any portion of the security you used to the insurer before they pay out, great, no problem. This is where it gets sticky, Kryptonite want a copy of your insurance claim before they pay out on your excess so you have to get the remains to the insurer first, now given the glacial speed with which insurance companies move, would it be unreasonable to assume that there is the teensiest possibility that they won't put the return of your broken lock at the top of their "To Do" list?

And there are time limitations too, and police reports etc...I will expand on this at a later date when I have the full list of hoops you have to jump through to satisfy Kryptonite.

This is the best bit.....ready? Kryptonite will pay up to £1200 (bike) of your insurance excess, so far so good, E&L insurers have a £100 excess on bikes £3000 and over so I think we can safely assume that unless you have a bike that costs £30,000 and you INSIST that you pay more excess, that you will NEVER get anywhere near the £1200 "Anti Theft Offer" maximum payout from Kryptonite.

Maybe it's just me, but if you have "£1200 Anti Theft Offer" plastered all over the packaging of a £60 D lock, then it's surely not too much to ask to also print some of the inconvenient details somewhere you can read them without ripping that package open. I wonder how many people have bought a Kryptonite product and then had a bike stolen only to find that they could not claim a penny from them because they COULDN'T read the small print when buying the product.

In my world this is called misleading advertising.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Thank you so much for this information!!! I was about to buy one of their bike locks today (with the 1200£ offer), but I hesitated right before reaching the cashier, because I had this strong feeling that there surely is a catch. Thank you for confirming it! Best Regards, Patrick

Unknown said...

Thank you so much for this information!!! I was about to buy one of their bike locks today (with the 1200£ offer), but I hesitated right before reaching the cashier, because I had this strong feeling that there surely is a catch. Thank you for confirming it! Best Regards, Patrick