nextbike 4+

I very rarely leave reviews, but this company truly deserves one. Firstly, I ride for 30 minutes a day for free on wonderful bikes with a comfortable seating position and soft tires, unlike the competitors. The rental price is very reasonable. Riding their bikes brings me great pleasure. A huge advantage is that renting a bike doesn’t require a lot of unnecessary actions, unlike the competitors. As for the drawbacks, I can only note the outdated interface and payment methods. Once, I had a debt and wanted to pay it off, but I couldn’t find a payment option and had to contact support. Additionally, most bikes are located in the city center since almost no one wants to ride uphill. I would be very happy if the bikes were more frequently distributed throughout the city.

The app is designed so you can’t really be sure by anything. Got charged for parking the bike in the wrong area. How was I supposed to know? When you park the bike in the wrong area it only shows the bikes name, and when u park it in the right area it also shows the stations name. And after 5 minutes it gives you a notification, that you parked wrong and that they are charging you a fee. You can relend it and repark it, and they will delete the fee, but how are you supposed to know? Oh yea it written in the conditions on the web. Is it so hard to do a pop up telling u that u parked wrong? Or even write in the notification with the fee, that you can repark it?? Also even the map is designed so that it’s easy to mistake a station for a bike. When I called support and I told them my side of the story, they only reimbursed me for half of the fee. I get that they get fees from the city, because people park in the wrong spots, but I feel like its also the only way the make money, because the app is designed to fool you. I will be switching to Rekola only now, they actually notify you, when you accidentally park in the wrong area, before they charge you :)

The app and service are great for the most part, but some technical “nightmares” can arise. Despite non 24/7 call center, the support is very reactive even out of business times, when issue reported from the app. My main concern right now is the fact that the “Start reservation” button linked to my PREVIOUS rented bike is jumping on my screen when I’m about to rent a new one. So yesterday, I tried to push on the QR scan button to rent a bike next to me, but the above mentioned button came in and I accidentally unlocked my previous bike, remotely! Then there’s no way to lock it again, since it’s a mechanical process. And you are responsible in case of theft or damages at that time. Please, developers, fix this issue! Thanks. Seems to me we shouldn’t be able to unlock a bike remotely at anytime anyway… Or is there a use case for that?

UPDATE: Reinstalling the app solved the problem I reported above. :-) Still, is there a reason to keep that “remote unlocking” feature in the app?