…Did you know that over 1.2 million people search for bike rentals alone on Google? In a closer analysis, Google Insights shows a 17% increase from 2010 to 2011, and forecasts an even larger growth spurt for 2012.

The numbers indicate that shoppers are actively searching for bike rentals online, meaning there is a huge opportunity for bicycle stores across the country. Today’s consumer is not only searching for your products online, but they are looking to book online. When they’re hungry, they make reservations online through OpenTable. When they want to take a trip, they book on Expedia, Kayak, Hipmunk and a host of other online travel portals.

• In 2010, over 50% of people booked their travel online
• 58% of customers research a product of service online prior to buying
• Online bookings are projected to grow an average of 8.1% each year from 2009 to 2014
• U.S. online transactions grew by 11% in 2009 despite the global economic recession

When a customer reserves a table at a restaurant on OpenTable, they make their reservation online and expect the table to be ready upon arrival. Why should consumers expect less from your bike rental business? What are you doing for your business to convert that online traffic into online revenue?

With Velolet, bike shops can be provide the customer service they have come to expect from travel sites and sites like Open Table It takes no time at all to get you up and listed and providing the services that 1.2M people look for when trying to rent a bike.

Bike Share programs exist and they are a great way to allow travelers to see the city… but they don’t necessarily fit the bill for everyone.  What if you could make arrangements prior to taking off for you destination and get a ride that better suits your cycling passion from reputable bike shops that can really offer you something guaranteed to be there and something you would want to ride.  Perfect example, events like SXSW make bike shops and Velolet a strong alternative to the bike share programs.  Prior to your trip, you book your flight, hotel AND BIKE with Mellow Johnnys.  When you get there, you aren’t hoping to grab a bike-share bike, your week long bike reservation is there and waiting for you when you arrive.

Velolet makes it easy for the travelers to search a centralized and standardized platform for just the bike they need for the ride they want to do in their size.  Then let the travelers sign waivers electronically and make the reservation and payment so when they arrive, the bike is prepped and ready.

So, rental drop-off because of a bike share program?  Doesn’t have to be that way… get to the finish line first by letting the traveling cyclist rent from you before they even touch down at their destination.  Velolet

So, if you’re headed out to Golden/Denver area to play in the powder, consider a diversion from the normal double and single plank fun and rent a Fat Tire Salsa Mukluk for a few days.

You’ll be hopping from place to place, smiling all the way.

Salsa Adventure By Bike

Discovery Channel Contributor Derek Markham put together a nice write up on Velolet.  Can’t thank him enough for the kind words and the exposure to our great service for bike owners.

…This service seems like a great way for bike shop owners to also get their bikes out and working for them, instead of waiting until someone calls or walks in asking about the bike. It also seems a natural fit for travelers, who might want the option to cruise around on a bike while at their destination, or who get the urge to rent a mountain bike after seeing some sweet trails nearby, or who get drafted into ‘just a little road ride’ by their cycle-crazy relatives.”

Read more here and thanks again to Derek and Discovery Channel

Here is generally what you need to do to get a bike rental at a shop:

• Find a Bike: Search online in countless Google, Bing or Yahoo searches, drill down to the bike shops listed, search their site for anything that says bike rental and if there are no rentals, start the process over again.
• Making a reservation: Call the bike shop.  Try to get the person in charge of bike rentals on the phone (sometimes a long wait as the bike rental person is either the owner or sales lead and they could be helping a customer.)
• Pay and Waivers: When you arrive, fill out a waiver with all your details, provide a credit card for processing.
• In store pickup: Wait until you arrive at the destination and hope your they have a bike in your size.  Wait sometimes up to 30min for them to “prep” your bicycle so and make adjustments so you can get your rental.

Here is the Velolet experience:

• Find a Bike: Open Velolet website and search for bikes at your destination city. Filter your results to your size and put in your dates/time for pickup and drop off.  Bike are presented (many times with pictures) and you select one and proceed to payment with a single click.
• Make Payment and process waiver: Secure reservation with credit card for EXACT bike and click online waiver.
• In store pickup: Walk in to the store, provide reservation confirmation number.   Bike shop is aware through prior notification of bike reservation of the exact bike to prep and have ready.  Store manager, wheels out the bike and you’re on your way (sub 5 minutes)

Full Cycle is a nonprofit bicycle shop in south Minneapolis that offers a six-month, paid internship program for homeless youth. They employ, train and support homeless youth, teaching them bike repair and hands-on business skills including resume writing, interviewing skills, sales, customer service and overall professionalism.

Tonight I’m participating in a fantastic fundraising event call Break The Cycle

I couldn’t be more pleased to volunteer and offer assistance to this fantastic organization.  Please take a few minutes to watch this great video and if you are interested in volunteering or helping out in some way, please let me know.

–Dan Cleary, CEO, Velolet The Bike Rental Hub

There are many places like Boulder and many opportunities to generate the kind of bike rental business that Doug does. At Velolet, we can provide you the in-house bike rental reservation platform that give you all the tools you need to manage your bike rental fleet and exposure your bikes to millions of travelers looking to rent when they travel.  contactus@velolet.com and we’ll send you the “quick start guide” to answer all your questions and show you how you can be up and running in minutes.

Currently, there is not much of a feedback loop to improve a bike shop’s service, specifically for bike rentals.  However, what we discovered over the past few months is that when prompted, the Renters actually provide pretty good constructive feedback, both positive and negative.  What we’ve seen however, is that the bike shops have improved their service to address any negative comments and it is seen in the  recent comments:

• Sun Sep 18, 2011 04:43PM - Great rental from a quality shop
• Sun Sep 11, 2011 06:09PM - Bike was Brand new. Bikes were ready, waiting for us when we came in. Great service
• Sun Sep 11, 2011 10:56PM - My experience was great…super staff, made sure it was perfect for my ride and picking it up and dropping it off was a breeze.

That feedback provides a mechanism for all parties including Velolet.  We’re not perfect but like our bike shops, we’re constantly improving and that is what matters to customers.  Addressing their issues and making it easy for them.

The feedback is great and we’d be remiss if it didn’t show how online bike rentals really improve an otherwise onerous process.  With Velolet, the reservation, waivers and payment is all made online.  This helps the bike shop “prep” your bike ahead of time and have it ready to go.  That helps the bike shop and it provides a great convenience for the Renters (as seen in the feedback comments).

We’re going to continue to improve and so are our customers.  Feedback is key to that constant improvement.  That can only benefit the Renter/consumers in the long run.

In fact, speaking to the customer-driven technology trend Bicycle Retailer and Industry News just published some recent commentary about bike brands also embracing technology.

“Everything points to consumers greatly preferring to buy from multi-channel retailers,” [SmartEtailing co-founder Barry Brenner]  ….  “Great companies play offense,” said Burke [John Burke, Trek President], alluding to the company’s new online strategy.

Right now, consumers are trending towards more online purchasing/services and it is not because they don’t love their local bike shop anymore.  It is just that they are in the habit of using useful technology throughout their entire day and so the expectation is that all their interactions at their work, grocery stores, and even their bike shop involve useful technology. And, bike shops can actually embrace it pretty easily whether that be through purchasing items or scheduling services or making bike rentals.  Technology makes the “interaction”work well for the consumer.

Many of the shops listed below do in fact, whether publicized or not, offer bike rentals and that is great but bike rentals are the perfect example of combining local bike shops with “useful technology.”  The ability to make an online bike rental reservation like the service offered by Velolet The Bike Rental Hub showcases the meld of the two.  The bike rental from the bike shop provides the customer what they need and the technology (Velolet’s online bike rental platform) makes it convenient, easy, and saves time.

We think over time, Bicycling Magazine’s quote will be extended a bit to, “Every cyclist needs a good shop–a place to get a fix, find new rides, or congregate in a space devoted to two-wheeled worship both online and offline.”  The world of mobile, the web, and other technologies isn’t going away and bike shops that embrace the useful aspects of it are going to be prepared for the “new” type of customers that will frequent their shops.

Bicycling Magazine definitely listed great shops (below), however, we think there are a lot more shops to add to the list and when these shops go beyond just having a website, to doing more with the useful technology available, like integrating with Velolet The Bike Rental Hub, they’ll be progressing to that next level.  Definitely check the shops out:

The Devil’s Gear Bike Shop, New Haven, CT (Matt and Dave will take of you)
Intown Bicycles, Atlanta, GA
East Burke Sports, East Burke, VT
Belmont Wheelworks, Belmont, MA
Drummond Custom Cycles, Enfield, NH
Cycle Smithy, Chicago, IL
American Cyclery, San Francisco, CA
Above Category, Mill Valley, CA
Fit Werx, Waitsfield, VT
Sports Garage, Boulder, CO
Nashville Bicycle Lounge, Nashville, TN
Fair Wheel Bikes, Tucson, AZ
R&A Cycles, Brooklyn, NY
Las Vegas Cyclery, Las Vegas, NV
The Path, Tustin, CA
Bike Gallery, Portland, OR
Passion Trail Bikes, Belmont, CA
Monkey Wrench Cycles, Lincoln, NE
White Pine Touring, Park City, UT (along with sister co. Jans — See Jack W and Scott H)
Cascade Bicycle Studio, Seattle, WA
Bike & Bean, Sedona, AZ
River City Bicycles, Portland, OR (see Dave and Brian)
Trail Head Cyclery, San Jose, CA
Wheat Ridge Cyclery, Wheat Ridge, CO
Bicycle Therapy, Philadelphia, PA
The Outdoorsman, Butte, MT
First Flight Bicycles, Statesville, NC
The Hub (and Pisgah Tavern), Brevard, NC
Budget Bicycle Center, Madison, WI
Power House, Hailey, ID
Metropolis Bikes, North Hollywood, CA
Recycled Cycles, Seattle, WA
Over the Edge Sports, Fruita, CO
Johnny Sprockets, Chicago, IL
Absolute Bikes, Salida, CO
Bicycle Trip, Santa Cruz, CA
Chili Pepper Bike Shop, Moab, UT
Great Lakes Cycling And Fitness, Ann Arbor, MI
Kraynick’s Bicycles, Pittsburgh, PA
Mellow Johnny’s, Austin, TX (find Sam Legge and he won’t even ask if you know that LA guy)
Sellwood Cycle Repair, Portland, OR
Fitzgerald’s Bicycles, Jackson Hole, WY
The Pedal House, Laramie, WY
Freeze Thaw Cycles, State College, PA
Fat Tire Farm, Portland, OR
Bicycle Habitat, New York City, NY
Velo Cult, San Diego, CA
Wheel and Sprocket, Hales Corner, WI (Chris Kegel has been keeping customers happy for over 35years)
Bike Peddler, Santa Rosa, CA

As background, demo bikes are a usual part of a manufacturer’s or distributors sales program designed to allow consumers to “try” before buying.  These demo bikes are usually used as part of an overall Demo program that the brand managers develop as part of their sales and marketing plans.  Trek Factory Demo is a great example.

The problem with these and many other programs like this is they are limited many times to only a day or two in a particular city, like Interbike’s Outdoor Demo Sept 12-13 in Las Vegas.  This event in particular points out a couple of issues.  First, Interbike isn’t designed for consumers, it’s for dealers (bike shops).  Second, with consumers, who already have a limited window of time because of family and friend commitments, can many times miss the day the demo bikes are in town, meaning there are limited opportunities to “try” the bikes.  Last, we also learned that many smaller manufacturers just simply don’t have the budget to roll-out a nationwide series of Demo Days.  They have the demo bikes but using a traveling caravan to host Demo Events can be cost prohibitive so they limit their demos to the IBD “buying” events, without any real plans to get consumers on those bikes.

Case in point, we come to find out that this distributor has almost a stockpile of demo bikes provided to them from a European bike manufacturer that they use throughout the year as demos.  Because the number of demo events are limited and a real pain to deal with in terms of shipping logistics and cost, 90% of the time the bikes sit in a warehouse collecting dust.  Just the opposite of the sales goals of a demo program, right?

So we asked, why not rent them out when they are not being used? They seem so under utilized and not effectively getting to the consumers to sample.  The answer, we are not set up to deal with that and the bikes are only in a single location.

Hold on a second, we said. The goal is to get more and more people to put their butts on bikes so they can try them out because if you can really try the bike out, you might be more inclined to buy one. Right?

So here was our idea:

1. Consign those bikes out to your top 20 shops/locations and list them for rent on Velolet. Get them out to places throughout the country like California, Oregon , New York, Colorado, Texas, Florida, etc..  Use the IBDs as your sales and marketers.
2. Let the IBD earn the bike rental income as an incentive to provide your sales and marketing.  The rental income can be used to buy those consigned bikes
3. Immediately following the demo rental, the consumer can be provided a direct promotional incentive (from the manufacturer or IBD) to purchase the bicycle.  That promotional incentive can be anything from the rental fee applied to the cost of the purchase or other direct factory incentives
4. It also doesn’t matter whether you are a big or a small manufacturer, by putting even 1 or 2 bikes at your dealers, you provide a much larger exposure then your current program which will inevitably lead to higher sales.

Velolet can handle the entire process, working with the IBDs directly. Don’t forget we cover the liability insurance so everyone is protected.  We also collect a tremendous amount of data that the distributors and manufacturers can use to see rental trends and conversions and customize their demo sales program as needed.

What does this all Velolet program accomplish? It gets more people trying your bikes which inevitably leads to increased sales. That’s the goal right? It also provides the IBD the ability to earn income to buy the consigned bikes for end of season sales, all while earning rental income.

We will be stopping by your booths at Interbike and we would love work out a gameplan with you. Trust us, it is worth your time. After all, we are the best online bike rental resource for your customers to find bike rentals.