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| - Dear baby Jesus, I need the strength to take a breath and write this review after the harrowing experience we had with this bike rental. First off, let me back track and say this is AMAZING that Pittsburgh has a bike rental service. We now have wide open bike lanes, a bike friendly community and people ready to hop on there and ride. Me being on of them. But hop on and ride I did not...
I had friends in from out of town and thought this would be the perfect opportunity to try this out for the first time. Probably in hindsight I should have done my research, but how hard could bike rental be? Very hard it turns out. I tried earlier to bring up their website and figure out how to tackle the steps needed before going. I was very confused with their website in terms of how to sign up. Plus, I thought it was weird there was no prompted for an app. When I googled an app, I couldn't find one either, so I figured there was none. I finally signed up for what was the first step. I tried to enter my credit card for the second step and it kept denying it.
We went to the kiosk on 10th and Penn and there was a kiosk, so I thought good, I can just do the transaction there. After typing in my phone number a couple times and then the pin I got in the email, the VERY sensitive key bad literally blacked out. Broken. Well... we finally got someone's card to work on their website and got the bikes out... after a half an hour of sorting out the rental process.
We gloriously rode down the Penn Ave bike lane. Wind in our hair, bell ringing and waving to happy people passing us by. It was awesome. We went to the Strip and locked our bikes up outside of Bella Notte and sat down for a bite. After some delicious pizza we were ready to roll again. After typing in 3 of the 4 pins we needed for our bikes, the last bike wouldn't unlock. Well, that's odd. We tried everything... they give you two pins, which is confusing in itself. We'd type in the two pins and then the screen would black out.
So we called costumer service and proceeded to be put on hold for over a half hour. We finally go through to India, because that's were the call center apparently is. We find out that there's a city wide issue and all the bikes are broken. Great. So we somehow convinced the dude to refund us for that bike. We literally had to leave the bike there, sadly.
So we biked down a couple blocks to the 21st and Smallman station and locked the 3 bikes up. We ended up seeing another sad looking couple who was also sitting on hold for the same problem. What a crappy situation. Thankfully, we were refunded for all 4 bikes, which was awesome, but still it kinda ruined our plans for the day.
Again, I'm SO excited that we have something like this in Pittsburgh, although I wish they would have gone with an American company instead of what I believe is a German manufacturer. And how about having an American call center as well... or better yet, a local one? How about one step further and have people out on the streets covering some ground when there's issues.
Some might say I'm crazy, but I'll give it another try. But I'll be wary.
IMPORTANT INFO: they do have an app called NextBike, so download it. I know, the name doesn't match up, but I think it's the company that runs them. My advice is to add all your information and have your credit card stored so you can hopefully have an easier time than I did!
My hope is that I can come back in a couple months and write a five star review.
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