Using Bike Share as Tourist is asking for Trouble

Using bicycles to explore a city is awesome.  Recently I visited to large cities that have bike sharing services.  Being able to rent bikes at one place and drop them off at another place was great but we ended up with a lot of headaches that caused irritation and inconvenience.

Berlin, Germany: Lidl Bikes 

Berlin has many bicycle sharing companies.  I picked Lidl Bikes since they had the most bikes available throughout the town. These bikes aren't tethered to stations, instead you just park them (nearly) anywhere.  If you park them at certain hot spots you get a discount on your rental.  Finding and renting the bikes is easy through the app.  However, one account can only rent two bikes at a time.  This meant that my wife had to create an account as well for the whole family to checkout bikes.

For some reason both accounts didn't work after we created them and linked them with our payment method.  It took forever to figure out what the issue was and ultimately it required a phone call to customer service to enable the accounts.

There is a delay between when the app shows the rental completion and when you park the bikes.  So one instance we didn't noticed until after a couple hours that one of the four bikes we rented and parked was still checked out to us and incurring charges.  Fear came over me that the bike isn't locked and someone took it to who knows where.  Customer service on the phone told me to go back to the bike and check that it's locked.  The customer service rep couldn't tell me if the bike was actually still there.  So we had to go back to the bike (30min walk) to check on it.  Luckily it was there and locked.  I called support again, had to enter a code and they determined that the bike was defect and a technician needed to come and fix it.  I provided the exact location (apparently they can't locate the bike).  While the charges were temporarily removed they appeared again later and were withdrawn from my account.  So another hassle to get these charges refunded.

Lidl bike share in Berlin

Chicago, USA: Divvy Bikes

Chicago has only Divvy Bikes.  These bicycles are bound to docking station.  You have to rent and return from a docking station.  It doesn't have to be the same docking station, but on return there must be a spot for the bike to be returned.  The app tells you how many spots and bikes are at each station.

This time there wasn't any issues getting the bikes, however the app was a bit confusing since you had to "buy a pass" and then if you don't use it right away the pass disappears.  Also the pass is bound to a specific number of bikes.  One account can rent four bikes, but I had to get a new pass when I wanted to just rent one bike.

We had two rentals.  One with four bikes for a little under 30 minutes and another one with a single bike for a little under 60 minutes.  I got charged $13.08 twice for the first rental. After the trip I contacted customer services and the told me "Passes expire 10 minutes after purchase if they are not applied. You attempted to use the passes 3 hours after purchase which is why you ended up purchasing new passes. This email is to confirm that you will receive a refund of your 4 unused pass fee".  For the second rental I got charged $3.27 for the first 30 minutes I presume and still have a $3.27 balance for the second 30 that will be billed next month.

Divvy bike share in Chicago

Conclusions

Both systems are not very intuitive to use and required customer service contacts to make things right.  While one way rentals are nice and convenient, the services were quite the hassle for such a short term visit.  For piece of mind and less hassle I'd recommend going with a traditional bicycle rental for tourists.  If you are longer or more often in that city it might be worth to figure out the quirks and issues of the bike sharing service.