ONN Bikes, the two-wheeler bike rental platform that is based in Bengaluru has taken a step forward to provide a better customer experience and make bike rentals hassle-free and enable quicker intra-city commutes by introducing dockless bikes on the basis of hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly bike rentals.
Since the introduction of cab services, going from one place to another has become very easy but gradually as the demand has increased, the prices are also going high. There are Ola and Uber for those looking for hired rides, but they sometimes have painfully long wait times or are unavailable.
To eliminate this problem, bike rental services were launched. ONN Bikes is one of the leading bike rental services that currently operates in Jaipur, Udaipur, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Delhi-NCR, and Mysore.
“Cabs fare has increased a lot and availability is a challenge. So, people have started renting bikes as an alternate mode of transportation,” said the founder of ONN Bikes, Namit Jain. “The cost of our self-driving bikes are 70% lower than that of cab rides.”
The company has recently launched a pilot in Bengaluru for Dockless Smart Bikes to enable commuters to drop bikes at any parking hub in the city. At present, the company provides bike rental plans at a reasonable Rs 8 per hour for 100cc bikes.
The company’s packages include:
Daily – Rs 175
Weekly – Rs 799
Monthly – Rs 2,899
However, the prices vary according to the brands and models and the minimum duration for which a person can rent a bike is one hour.
ONN Bikes has plans to expand further and bring its operations to Pune, Kochi, Ahmedabad, Himachal Pradesh, and Vizag by the end of 2018. Along with this, it is also eyeing to enter 85 new locations, mostly tourist hubs across India by 2022.
“We are not an asset party. We have a certain set of investors who lease us these bikes on our platform and we connect to the users to them,” said Jain.
Jain also stated that the dockless scooter trend is popular in countries like the US and China where the commuter can start the ride from any parking hub by scanning a QR code and drop it at any parking hub. The riders are charged according to the distance travelled. The company is planning to launch the dockless service by August in Bengaluru.
The Dockless Smart Bikes project will utilize improved technology that includes geo-location and geo-tagging, along with immobilisation of bikes to check the risk of theft. These are the initial days for bike rental startups and let’s see if such technologies will boost up this service or not.