• This topic has 47 replies, 43 voices, and was last updated 12 years ago by juan.
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  • bike Hire, 40 quid per day, HAVING A LAUGH
  • project
    Free Member

    Is that just over the top, i can hire a new Astra for 30 quid a day, thats 24 hours, not shop hours, eg 9 to 5, so thats 15 minutes PLUS lost to order the bike, and probably 15 mins PLUS to return then the time lost driving from the shop to a trail centre.

    creamegg
    Free Member

    take the astra out on the trail then. doubt you’ll get your deposit back

    titusrider
    Free Member

    LOL – not hired in morzine then i guess?, i did a week at 100 euros a day for a spesh Demo 9 back in the day

    learned my lesson and bought a cheap 2nd hand dh bike to take out the following year though

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    JoB
    Free Member

    my car requires considerably less maintenance and cleaning after 30 miles than my mountainbike

    Aidy
    Free Member

    my car requires considerably less maintenance and cleaning after 30 miles than my mountainbike

    Probably quite a lot more in terms of insurance, though.

    TheFlyingOx
    Full Member

    You also have a gigantic excess to post on your rental Astra, and a hell of a lot of rules and regs to follow, i.e. the Highway Code, possessing a valid driving license. Smash your rental Astra up and it’s highly unlikely you’ll only have paid the rental fee when the dust has settled.

    Superficial
    Free Member

    Ski / snowboard hire is the one that gets me. You’ll pay at least £150 for a week to hire equipment with an RRP of £500 ish. Ludicrous.

    portlyone
    Full Member

    Seems ok to me. Much bigger likelihood of the bike not being returned??

    13thfloormonk
    Full Member

    Hire bikes have a hard life, I don’t think a single one of our high end demo bikes came back without something wrong with it, or for that matter, any grease left in the bearings (how people managed to return bikes still dirty after quite obviously having jetwashed the living christ out of them, I’ll never know).

    Admittedly we were only asking £50 for two days, but I reckon £40 a day for something decent, which works, isn’t outrageous (doesn’t Laggan wolftrax charge £35 a day for Giant Trances?)

    Burts
    Free Member

    Sounds reasonable. Here in BC, its $70-80/day for a trail/AM bike or about $100 for a DH bike in the bike parks.

    legalalien
    Free Member

    I don’t think it’s too outrageous. The wife an I are planning trip to the UK and one part of it will be spent in Wales. This morning I mentioned I could take the kids to Coed-y-Brenin for a day out and a spin around the forest, but we’d have to hire bikes. I wondered how much it would be and this thread prompted me to look up prices.

    A very quick and lazy Google found Beics Brenin who have some pretty nice bikes in the same ballpark – 40 to 50 quid per day. Always fancied trying a Spesh Enduro Expert. No more expensive than a theme park day out or whatever.

    Northwind
    Full Member

    Hire bikes spend an awful lot of their time standing around doing nothing, it’s not like a hire car where you can have pretty constant turnaround- you’ve got a small fleet and you want to get all of it out at the weekend but how many midweek hires? How many midwinter hires?

    Fuel/tax/insurance aside, my bikes cost more to run than my car (if you include maintenance time).

    Burls72
    Free Member

    It’s the same with the new price of bikes. £3-4K is about the average for a good full sus but you can buy a new car for £5-6K. You can buy a good scooter for £1.5K. When you think of all the parts in a motorbike or car and compare them to a mountain bike it’s a rip off. Road bikes are even worse!

    agentdagnamit
    Free Member

    Try hiring in Chamonix

    allmountainventure
    Free Member

    Maybe they are in business to make a profit? 😯

    They will have a revolving door for those bikes, no-one wants to rent a bike that looks like its been flung around a quarry. No one would buy an ex hire that looked that way either.

    Day to day I bet they spend a lot on tyres. Who’s going to care about locking up the back wheel on a hire bike?

    Some one also has to check the condition before and after every hire and keep defect/repair records.

    jruk
    Free Member

    If you don’t like it don’t pay it. Or, take your own kit and rent it out when you’re not using it. Sure you’ll make a killing 🙂

    bm0p700f
    Free Member

    Its not aa rip off. A hire bike will have a hard life and may get jetwashed which will kill all the bearings and forks. It will be expensive to keep them going.

    poly
    Free Member

    So project – you think you can do it cheaper? I’d say its the going rate for a reasonable spec full sus.

    Cost £ 2000
    Manpower to book bike out 15mins (set up, paperwork, payment, deposit etc)
    Manpower to clean and deal with minor issues on return 10 mins
    Manpower to periodically service the bike – say 2 hours every 12 full days = 10 mins per hire; including periodically servicing the suspension
    Replacement parts at cost £4 per hire?

    Then there are general overheads – a shopfront, workshop & storage space, heat/light, phone line, website, insurance, accountants etc. Many places loan helmets for free etc too.

    Then after 2 years you might sell it for £1000?

    VAT @ 20%.
    Credit card processing 2%

    So £40, actually only brings you in £32.50.
    Take off £4 for parts.
    Then 35 mins labour £8.75 for cost of staff
    = £19.75

    You’ve got to rent that bike 51 times just to make your money back never mind recover your overheads…

    ojom
    Free Member

    Thanks Poly, that saved me typing all that.

    We have a loaner/demo Cube Stereo (have had many demo bikes previously but this year we have this so far)

    After one week of loaning it to a Lapierre customer who was waiting on a warranty claim we had a bent saddle, bent right brake lever and the left hand lock on grip collar has lost a lot of metal…

    It has had 2 subsequent loans, none of which are being charged out. More issues will no doubt appear.

    Normal demo charge is £30 and we clean it.

    No one makes money off that in any shop. If they do, i would love to see how they do it.

    poly
    Free Member

    Oh, and actually for many people it actually makes more financial sense than owning an expensive high maintainence bike. Many people “need” a full suss what 4 times a year (the rest of the time a hard tail would suffice). So £160. Which for a “part time biker” is probably about the same as it would cost to maintain and insure that extra bike for a year – never mind the capital outlay!

    ojom
    Free Member

    ^ at the moment that is my attitude to cars. Hire a good un when i need one.

    joat
    Full Member

    O.K. Say the bike costs £2k trade, guessing it will lose half its value in a year after being abused, so £1k. So it will have to be demo’d/hired 25 times @ £40 to break even. This doesn’t include any servicing or replacement parts either, so it’s not hard to see that a shop will build in a few safety margins so as not to make a loss. I’ve just guessed a couple of figures, but I wouldn’t like to work out how much my bike costs per ride when everything is taken into consideration.

    Edit: I wish I could type faster! Honest I didn’t copy…

    maccruiskeen
    Full Member

    Whats that saying about knowing the cost of everything but the value of nothing?

    Its the service not the thing you’re hiring. Having what you want available to you when you want it

    things you rent cost £30 -£40 –
    if I hire a £15k van its £30-£40,
    if I hire a £2k bike its £30-£40
    if I hire a £300 generator £30-£40

    Cars and vans seem cheap to hire in that equation – but you can hire a car out any day and everyday of the year and be getting a return from it, hire co’s can have most of their stock out on the road every day of the year – the company I hire from only closes on Christmas day.

    Bikes you’re only really going to see a return from at weekends, mostly weekends in the summer, and mostly weekends in the summer where rain isn’t forecast. So although they cost less they return less, but you’ve got to cover the overheads all year round. And you’ve got to stock enough sizes for all the shapes of customers you might get, so you’ll always be left with some of you stock unhired

    Toolhire co’s need to have pretty much every tool you might ask for have available, and enough of them for more than one person to ask and not be turning away trade, so they have a huge amount of capital tied up, and a lot of space to store it all, but only a fraction of that stuff is out on hire at anytime earning a return.

    zbonty
    Full Member

    £40 a day. Blimmin’ cheap i say.

    robhughes
    Free Member

    Hired a spicy 516 out at GT for £40.
    Absolutely loved the thing.
    Built one up.
    Best £40 iv,e ever spent.
    That is the end of my story. 😀

    Coyote
    Free Member

    $100CAD for a bike in Whistler Bike Park. For that you get the use of a top spec bike plus the backup of fantastic mechanics. As said above, If you don’t like it don’t hire it. Just buy yer own.

    project
    Free Member

    So how much do magazines pay to have test bikes then, or do they get paid to test them ,or would that be unethical,eh.

    Also surely if a bike is damaged,then its a warranty issue if the damage is not caused by neglect.
    oh and all bike shops get to purchase bikes at trade prices, not the full price we would pay, as well as all the parts required.

    maccruiskeen
    Full Member

    So how much do magazines pay to have test bikes then, or do they get paid to test them ,or would that be unethical,eh.

    Also surely if a bike is damaged,then its a warranty issue if the damage is not caused by neglect.
    oh and all bike shops get to purchase bikes at trade prices, not the full price we would pay, as well as all the parts required.

    are you drunk?

    wallop
    Full Member

    Glyncorrwg hire their demos out for £15 an hour!

    convert
    Full Member

    Also surely if a bike is damaged,then its a warranty issue if the damage is not caused by neglect.

    Or wear and tear. Lots more wear and tear on a mtb than city bike and things that will get broken in a mountain environment through reasonable use that would take neglect in an urban one.

    oh and all bike shops get to purchase bikes at trade prices,

    true but 20% of the hire price is VAT.

    simondbarnes
    Full Member

    £40 for a day’s hire seems like remarkably good value to me.

    Rorschach
    Free Member

    if a bike is damaged,then its a warranty issue if the damage is not caused by neglect

    Been at the cooking sherry have we?

    Woody
    Free Member

    I’m with those who think £40 a day for a decent bike is very good value.

    flippinheckler
    Free Member

    Buy a bike after you hired it, they will knock the price you paid off the bike then, happy days.

    creamegg
    Free Member

    So how much do magazines pay to have test bikes then, or do they get paid to test them ,or would that be unethical,eh.

    Im guessing it would normally be the manufacturer providing the bikes for magazines not hire centres. It’s completelly different. The manufacturers provide new kit to magazines so they can get good reviews and free publicity. Do you expect the manufacture to give you a bike to pootle around for free?

    If you think they’re making a fortune why dont you set up your own hire centre?

    walleater
    Full Member

    When I looked after a fleet of hire bikes near Cannock Chase, I must have installed at least a million sets of brake pads during the winter. Add to that at least three billion sets of shift cables and it soon becomes what feels like a full time job just trying to keep 20 bikes in a ride-able condition.

    maccruiskeen
    Full Member

    Actually. In the cold, sober light of day I think Project has a point. More people need to know about the tyranny that is retailers buy goods and services at wholesale and sell them at retail in order to make a ‘living’. This abuse of good, honest, hardworking, multiple bike owning cyclists needs to end.

    I’m going to set up a charity expensive bike hire scheme so that people who already own one or more bikes can hire another, perhaps more expensive bike for about the price of a bus ticket. Or more importantly so the people who aren’t going to hire a bike don’t need to have a fit about what it might cost if they did.

    I’m going to make a video about it and stick it up on Facebook (I’m going to have to borrow someone’s son and he needs to be really cute), I’m relying on you to all like it and buy my wristbands, and to wear glasses without any lenses in as a sign of solidarity. By the end of the year its our hope that the American government will either extraordinarily renditionize Riks Bike Shed or accidentally shoot Riks Bike Shed then quickly hide the body.

    julianwilson
    Free Member

    Good thread.

    At the start of this thread I thought £40 was a lot of money versus how many rides I would get out of a £2k bike (not that £2k bikes are in my financial reach at the moment!).

    But the comments abour breakdown of costs, vat, customers breaking/bending little bits of bikes etc posted up above make a good deal of sense: I won’t begrudge having to pay that sort of money if I ever do hire a ‘good’ bike.

    Amazing people do/can afford to loan out demo bikes on that basis.

    This is probably a cushty example, partly driven by the close network of lady xc racers in the south west, and a drive to sell more (well, any at all!) 29ers to women, but mrs j has just driven off for a weekend with a spanking new unridden £2.2k laydeez spesh 29er which she is being loaned for free from our local enormo-store, only condition being she takes some rad photos of her and her girlfiends being converted to the joy of 29″ wheels, and writes some comments/observations down for the rep. They will have to sell a lot of those bikes to make their money back on the three sizes of that bike they are running as demo bikes this year! BTW, they also look well nice and not at all girly. Hopefully she will let me have a quick razz in the woods on it before it goes back.

    project
    Free Member

    Well it seems as if the cost of the hire of a bike is refundable if i purchase the bike or a similar model from the shops who hire bikes to us the customers.

    Now that puts it all in a new light, and thanks to the 2 bike shops i rang today and pointed that out.

    Thanks, for everyones input.

    stanfree
    Free Member

    £40 for a top end full suss bike seems like a bargain to me , Alpine at GT also do a half day hardtail hire for £12. Half a day at GT will see you cover pretty much all the trails . As someone above said look at tool hire where you can hire a £400 Edging sander for £40 a day .

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