SendBike Reviews 1,504

Apart from sending me the wrong sized bike box to what I had ordered (quickly rectified) all started off well. Bike picked up on time by DHL, initial shipment note was for pick-up in 3 hour window on 25/03/24 (it was by DHL) and delivery on 26/03/24 to a hotel in Portugal where I planned to meet it on 2nd April. (Easter weekend so I sent it early to be sure it was there when I arrived). It is now 5th April and no sign, still in customs, and as previous reviewers have said absolutely hopeless customer service from Sendbike. They seem to have completely washed their hands of me / it. The DHL people in Portugal are very helpful but two things appear to have got it blocked in Customs.
A) I put the name of the concierge of the hotel as receiver - because I expected the bike to be there a week before me. DON’T do that - it makes customs think you are shipping to someone else and not your personal property to yourself.
B) the original form - completed by Sendbike put the customs value at £39. One of the Sendbike emails said “the value on your proforma is the customs value not your insurance value”. They did not explain that if I was later asked what was the actual value of the goods (as I was by DHL) I should have stuck with that and not given the ‘real’ replacement value. I had already told the replacement value in a email to Sendbike and when I was later asked by DHL for the value of the goods in the box I answered honestly - more than £1,200. Touring bike, panniers, tent, clothes, equipment etc. Customs said that the two amounts should be the same, and after two days of to-ing and fro-Ing I had to list the value of each item individually in the bike box. I have had three days in Portugal of thrice daily calls to DHL (uniformly helpful) and zero help from Sendbike. Zero. They have no phone number listed to be able to call them and the chatbot people/machines show no sign of actually wanting to help you get out of the mess they have got you into.
I strongly advise not using Sendbike. Get your own bike box from local bike shop and use DHL direct. And check and double-check A and B above.
Worse places to wait for a bike than the Algarve but I want to get my tour underway and am sure Sendbike won’t pay for hassle or extra hotel spend etc.
Stressed out and supposed to be my retirement holiday. Thanks for absolutely nothing Sendbike.

Update - April 9th. I paid 1,158 euros to get my bike out of customs plus a week of unplanned hotel bills. As in all sendbike’s correspondence they try to shift the blame onto DHL. That is wrong. DHL were helpful. It is sendbike who should be making it clear on the points I raise above; and most importantly if something does go wrong it should be sendbike trying to sort it out. They did nothing apart from try to shift the blame to DHL - who didn’t deserve it. And more nonsense in their reply below seeming to suggest there was a problem with the package size - there wasn’t - it was one of Sendbikes boxes.
The service was awful, it has cost me a lot of money and hassle, and I find their attempts to blame DHL shameful.

Once again, I want to thank the team for their smooth handling of the shipment of several bicycles. Correct decisions were made at every stage of the process, and overall, I am satisfied with everything. My respect, and I hope to continue using your services in the future!

Box arrived next day. Solid construction. Bike shipped UK-> Malaysia as airline accompanied baggage, box still in good condition on arrival.

SendBike saved me, for months I was debating if the boxes are good enough to flyout my Specialised Bicycle. They were helpful with my order and gave very good advice. The box arrived the next day and packing my bicycle with the minimum to dismantle was a relief. The box was strong enough to withstand some bashing during transport despite having "Fragile" tape all over !!
Thank you SendBike.

Amazing service, so easy and much nicer touch that there is an actual person you can speak to (Pippa was amazing) rather than an automated system.

Finally i found the team that does exactly as said - delivers bikes. Nothing like small parcles, othe office stuff. Taken. Driven. Delivered. Simply as that.

Really quick delivery and exactly as described. Will definitely use again!

As a bike shop, we'd looked for a shipping solution for a while, to keep up with online ebike demands.. since we came across sendbike, we haven't looked back!

Always available on the other side for assistance and the service provided is excellent every time. They went out of their way to create me a portal that I can streamline the order process on - couldn't ask for more.

I could ramble on and on about things Pippa and the team have done for us, but they're on the way to collect more bikes, so I must away!

I've known this service for many years. They're always available for any questions. The shipment was delivered promptly and on the 13th day from the date of dispatch, it was ready for pickup. Packaged excellently. I recommend the service!

Similar to other recent reviews I paid Sendbike to transport my bike and they basically acted as a 3rd party agent for DHL.
My bike was collected from London on 16/2/2024, it is now 15/3/2024 and the bike remains in Madrid pending "customs clearance" despite having sent all requested information and confirming the contents of the bike box as being my personal property and for my personal use.
I have contacted Sendbike for support around this and they basically washed their hands of it saying DHL would not talk to them.
Based on the experience so far I wish I'd not bothered with Sendbike and just hired a decent bike for my time in Spain.
Thanks for nothing Sendbike, I don’t suppose I'll ever see my bike again!
Thanks for the response but I know the bike was delivered and signed for as I took delivery and signed for it. I also had to carry the 17 kilo bike box the 300 yards or so uphill as DHL had no intention of delivering it to my front door. As I say thanks for the response but why bother when you don’t offer any real help or support?

In case you were thinking of using SendBike to transport your bikes to Europe I would like to share with you our experience. We contacted SendBike in August 2023 to organise delivery of two bikes to southern Spain for a six week cycling holiday including a return to the UK and insurance for loss and damages. They promptly took payment and arranged a pickup and return dates for 4th January 2024 (pickup UK) and return from Spain 16th February 2024 using DHL as the courier. We also provided information required for custom clearance in Spain i.e. passport numbers, contents and addresses etc. The bikes were picked up on the 4th Jan. and delivered to Barcelona on the 8th January 2024 at which point it all fell apart.

The first indication that something was amiss was when we received an email from DHL on the 9th Jan. requesting information on the contents of the boxes and the purpose of our visit. We replied stating that SendBike was given this information to pass on to DHL who promptly replied that they had not received any information about our bikes. When we asked SendBike about this they told us to deal with DHL ourselves as they would not talk to SendBike about the shipment (so what did we pay SendBike for?).

I won’t bore you with the details of the next 5 1/2 weeks of email traffic between us and DHL but suffice to say our bikes never left the Barcelona customs facility and we had to incur an extra cost of hiring bikes to salvage what remained of our ruined holiday.

We returned to the UK on the 19th February and our bikes were delivered back to our UK address on the 21st February but with damage to one of the bike boxes. We then contacted SendBike to arrange a full refund as they failed on their promise to deliver door to door our bikes. We also requested compensation for the damaged bike box via the insurance we bought from them. This has now been over 2 weeks since we complained and requested the refund with no success. They have not acknowledged their responsibility in any of this, furthermore they keep passing us on to different people in their company (we are now on the forth) who simply request the same information over and over again.

So if you are going to use SendBike you will basically pay them to ring up DHL and arrange a pick up date. If things do go wrong you are on your own and as far as compensation is concerned forget about it. I sincerely recommend you find an alternative to using these clowns.

In response to the SendBike reply regarding this review.
Firstly, they did not refund us, it was our credit card company who after upholding our complaint of a failed service used the “charge back” facility. The consumer advice Scotland (citizens advice UK for England and Wales) recommended we contact our credit card company to initiate this if SendBike failed to resolve the complaint which at that point they had stopped all communication with us.
As to the issue with the locks SendBike at no point advised us not to use them from when we purchased the service (17/08/2023), all through the six week nightmare we had in Spain trying to get our bikes out of custom clearance which included over 30 emails with SendBike and 11 emails with DHL clearance. In fact one of the last emails with DHL requested the lock combination and authorisation to open and review contents of the bike boxes which we promptly gave.
In addition the claim for the damaged bike box has not been upheld even though we purchased insurance from SendBike. The first email we received from them after our credit card company used the “charge back” facility read as follows

"We see order has not been paid for now due to chargeback, this means we are unable to process any damage claim with DHL as they have not been paid?
Please confirm in one line. Would you like to start a claim to ask DHL to refund service costs or damage?
Currently service has not been paid for but I have stopped this going to our collecting partners"

Therefore we have given up any hope of compensation for the damages.

I would like to add quoting some of SendBike choice advertisements from their website, Instagram and Facebook pages:

"Anywhere you want. On time. On budget."

"SendBike guarantee a seamless shipping experience wherever you cycling adventure takes you"

"Take your own bike with you, its actually easier less paperwork than renting one!"

"SendBike is here to make it hassle-free"

"Customs advice to avoid unnecessary delays"

In our case none of the above was realised and it is our belief that SendBike has no idea of how to to handle “temporary shipment” for holiday makers into a post Brexit Europe. If you find yourself in a similar situation as us we would highly recommend contacting citizens advice UK and your credit card company.

Thanks, guys! Always attentive attitude, good packaging. I've been using the services for a long time! Keep it up.

Good day! Once again, I want to thank the SendBike team for another well-coordinated work on organizing the shipment of several bicycles. At every stage of the cycle, correct decisions were made, and overall, I am satisfied with everything. My respect, and I hope to continue using your services in the future!

After failing to ship my box for a week, their customer service team responded quickly and shipped off a new box. They took a quite poor quality user experience and salvaged it for me.

Expensive service, but reliable. I do think they overcharge - its often cheaper just to book courier collection directly.

Thank you for another shipment! I'm overjoyed! I've been with you for many years, you always come through, there are no words. Consultants are always available, they help with order processing. I regularly order bike shipments to Italy, and everything is always clear and on time. I wholeheartedly recommend your service.

I have long dreamed of bringing my bicycle to England. I simply bought it in the USA a few months before finding out that I would be moving to London, and here it would really come in handy for exploring the surroundings, leisure activities, and trips :) In short, it's just sitting idle there, but here it's really needed.

Indeed, there is a company that exclusively deals with transporting bicycles. I am completely satisfied with the service provided by SendBike. Everything arrived on time and as initially stated. Thank you very much!

Used sendbikes to get my personal bike (around the value of 300£) from the Netherlands to the UK. I was assured that all taxes and import duties were included in the quote, and that based on the information i gave them about the bike, taken care of by sendbike. I was then issued with a large tax invoice from DHL, saying that the bike would not be delivered until this was received. Sendbike were appalling communicators, did nothing to support resolving this issue, and provided incorrect contact information for DHL (who they refused to engage with directly). They were unable to provide information or guidance about why they had mis-sold their service, as covering taxes and import duties.
The company is not useful in any way, they simply book with DHL and they absolve responsibility.
I would not recommend this service in any instance. Anytime i tried to contact them it was a nightmare - after going through this process i now understand more in 2 days about shipping bikes than they do in their company.

The first thing that surprised me was the format of electronic notifications. And also, they deliver practically anywhere in the world. Very satisfied. Thank you.

We have been transporting bikes for the whole family with this company for quite some time now. Overall, everything suits us. The staff are friendly.