Last weekend, me and my friends decided to go for a tour of Regent Canal by bicycle, and therefore we looked for a bike hire service in London. Between all the websites we found this one, an appealing website with photographs of fantastic dutch classical bikes for hire in London.
The website shows photographs of really nice and stylish bikes which are for rent at a decent price, 25 pounds per day per bike if you hire them for 1-3 days. Even though there were cheaper options we decided to treat ourselves for one day and choose one of these appealing bicycles, just to make it a really unique experience for one day! If only we knew!
The delivery process is quite straightforward, you choose a bicycle and they deliver it to you wherever you are in London with a little van. And here we had the first surprise: they delivered to us 3 bikes and none of them was what they promised to us!
The bikes were all different between them, really old, and definitely nothing even resembling the dutch bikes that you find on the website! We thought we shouldn't complain mainly because we wanted the bikes for our day out, so we kept quiet and started off our day. Problem is, after 10 minutes we had left one of the bikes lost the chain so we had to stop and fix it. Due to the make of the bike this was a more difficult task than it is normally (we all rode bikes all our lives and are know how to fix them), so after 10 minutes and a lot of black grease on our hands, we were ready to go again.
Unfortunately this happened other 3 times, and we were still at 1/5th of our journey and really late. So we decided to call the office and ask them to bring us another bike. They didn't sound too happy about our request and tried to explain to us how to fix the chain by phone (which being them Polish is not really easy!) Seeing that this didn't work, they agreed to come with a new bike, but only after 2 hours, so we had to force-stop for a long lunch break and wait for them and for our replacement bike. At the established time the van arrived, and the DutchBikes guy tried to fix the chain and then offered us another bike which was absolutely terrible! Old, scruffy, and really too high for my friend, and having to ride along the canal we didn't feel confident to use it. So we proposed the guy, who was already pissed off, if we could keep the old bike but have a discount, seeing that we had already lost the morning because of the delays that the chain caused.
He reacted really badly, starting to shout that we didn't know how to use the bicycles and that they were fine and we didn't deserve any discount. We really wanted to finish our trip so we just told him we would have kept the bikes but we would have never used him anymore and he got even madder, took the bikes back and gave us our money back.
That was the end of our trip! We went back to regents park by foot and spent the rest if the day there! at least we had our money back, but the day was totally spoilt by these people's dishonesty!
I think the worst thing of it all is not to receive the service you are willing to pay for. The images shown in the website are totally deceiving and show a product you are never gonna get, so you end up paying more for a really bad product that doesn't even bring you where you have to go!
Welcome to Ciao! Your story sounds quite odd as it does not agree with other people's experience of this company . . . I fail to understand what you are complaining about ~ Have their prices increased? they used to be £20/day . . . I remember the first time I tried to ride an english bike when I was used to one with "back-pedal" brakes . . . . it was a temporary disaster . . . but each bike needs time to get used to. . . . I am very surprised you had such trouble . . . are you sure it happened quite like you have described?
. . . . ♥ jes ♥
Jul 3rd, 2009
very helpful by (100%):
