Running a bike-rental business means being quick on your feet to keep up with demand. Together with bike maintenance, bookings and tracking finances, things can often get pretty intense. Here at yoyo, we’re always looking for ways to help you stay organised and keep delivering a top riding experience while maximising the ROI on your bikes.
As well as tracking your inventory and sending you maintenance reminders, our bike rental platform allows customers to make online bookings. This means that your riders can take control of their booking 24/7/365, giving them year-round access to your bike-rental services.
To make things even simpler, you can set up specific sessions within your online booking system. For example, you could give your customers the choice of either morning (09:00–12:00), afternoon (13:00–16:00) or full-day (09:00–17:00) sessions. You can choose how long each session lasts, and add or remove times according to your seasonal opening hours.
While a free-booking system would give your customers the flexibility to turn up at random times and book your bikes to suit their own schedule, this can cause chaos within the shop. Instead, a session-based booking system can help keep your bike rental business better organised, and here’s how.
If customers can freely book your bikes for any time, then it’s hard to know how many bikes you’ll have available. This can make it confusing to work out when bikes will be returned and ready to go out again, especially with larger fleets, making it difficult to keep track of your bookings, availability and equipment.
Alternatively, a session-based booking system means you know exactly how many bikes you have available during that specific period. This means that you can only have so many customers at any one time, making it easier to keep track of what’s going on.
When people can freely book to suit their own schedule, it can be tricky to know what stock and how many staff you need. A sudden surge in footfall at random times might be great in terms of income, but not so great if you’re unable to meet the demand.
On the other hand, having set sessions will give you a clearer idea of how many staff, bikes and accessories you need to have ready each day. While you might get a sudden surge of afternoon bookings that morning, this will still give you enough time to call in extra help if needed.
Random booking slots will mean a constant flow of visitors arriving and leaving, making it difficult to keep on top of your fleet. Although you might project a 30-minute handover and maintenance period for each random booking, you’ll also need to look after those who are arriving. If this delays your maintenance, this will have a knock-on effect and impact all other bookings for the rest of the day.
With a session-based booking system, all bikes are returned at specific times which means your mechanics will be able to schedule in specific maintenance time. With no other distractions, this will help them stay organised and ensure that every bike receives a once-over before heading back out on the tracks.
All the above will result in a better service for your customers. A session-based booking system will ensure you have enough staff and equipment to meet demand at any given time, while also giving your team more structure so they can stay organised and deliver exceptional customer service.
Plus, with dedicated maintenance time, you can make sure all your bikes are in tip-top condition for an awesome riding experience!
At yoyo, we’re all about making things simpler for you and our session-based booking system is just one of the many ways we’re putting bike rental managers back in control of their business. Want to give it a try? If you’re just starting out on your bike rental journey, then you’ll be happy to hear that we’re free forever for smaller fleets of 10 or less!