A lot of cyclists ask us for more information on the delivery costs, since those can significantly impact the order’s total amount. Below, we share a few insights and examples for you to understand more how this works.
An overview of a sophisticated, complex system makes the pricing.
For years now we collect a lot of data for the locations cyclists prefer to rent a bike. At the same time we have modelled how our operations should work in order to ensure efficient occupations of our resources, increased bike availability and respect for the environment. All these parameters are constantly being calculated from our booking servers, aiming to find the optimal scenario for every request. Therefore, the moment you select your location and your desired bikes, this complex system checks the availability and once the bikes are available, it factors in where there are located, where were are our van and which is the most cost effective way to delivery to you.
Perhaps sharing a example would make things a bit easier.
Example 1: On 1st of May, one of our cycling vans is scheduled to travel from the city of Kalamata to Athens. At the same time a cyclist is looking for a bike in the region of Corinth for the next day, the 2nd on May. This bike happens to be located in Kalamata. In that case the delivery costs would only reflect the fees for storing the bikes at our Corinth Hub for one day, since Corinth imposes no deviation time to the scheduled van’s route from Kalamata to Athens.
Example 2: Additionally to the above, a cycling group, which resides at Kiato, a town 30 minutes of driving away from Corinth, requests for 4 bikes on the 2nd of May. The system checks the availability and finds out that the optimal scenario would be to allocate 2 bikes in Kalamata, which will be shipped with the cycling van used in the example 1, at no cost, and 2 bikes from our hub in Athens. Here, the costs are calculated based on storing 2 bikes in our Corinth hub, plus the intra-transfer for 2 bikes from Athens to Corinth and the employment service from Corinth to Kiato.
Complex scenarios: In the cases where a request has a more complex impact on our operational load, the software can also advise our operation team to spend the night at the place en route to our delivery destination.
Fun fact: for the wildest of cases, the software might recommend our ops teams to… camp. That really blows our mind!
The earlier the better, fair pricing for all any time.
Approximately 70% of our resources (bikes and cycling vans) are allocated at least 6 months before. That gives us a great opportunity to plan and offer you the best possible rates. Therefore, last minute bookings is possible to come with a premium, since the bikes availability is not elastic, mainly due to already confirmed bookings and fixed transportation van routes. We refrain from making last minute offers, since such practise increases the exposure of our delivery service to unforeseeable events (e.g. a bike is destroyed and finding a replacement for the bookings to follow might result a great cost for us), therefore we strongly recommend all cyclists to confirm their bikes the soonest they have their travelling plans confirmed.