Hi guys,
Apologies if this is not the correct forum to post this (or if similar has been posted before), but I wanted to share a quick warning on leaving your bike in the care of wash bay staff at Cycle Lab Bike Park in Bryanston.
I am a member and regularly use the bike wash after a ride. While it's by no means a thorough clean, it's good enough to get most of the dirt off before loading up and heading home. The issue is that there is no owner verification in place at the facility. When you handover your bike you do not receive any token to indicate ownership to hand back at collection. This means its entirely up to the wash bay staff to link owners with bikes during collection. Definitely a tough ask given the amount of bikes they would see pass through the wash bay in a day.
After a recent ride on 29/12/2021, myself and a friend handed in our bikes at the wash bay and headed over to the canteen for a coffee. When we got back to the wash bay our two bikes were missing. It turns out that some other riders assumed they were rentals and took them into the park. While we got our bikes back, it was a very upsetting/frustrating experience because:
1. Our private property was taken without our permission and effectively treated like a public rental.
2. Instead of being taken into the park by other riders, the incident clearly demonstrates that our bikes could easily have been taken out of the facility and stolen.
3. The management staff at Cycle Lab Bike Park refused to take any responsibility and insisted that if the bikes have been damaged we would need to sort that out with the persons who took our bikes as it was not up to the staff at the wash bay to verify ownership.
I haven't taken a look at the membership contract fine print, but I'm assuming if our bikes had been stolen or damaged there would be a clause indemnifying Cycle Lab Bike Park. Please keep this in mind when leaving your (often very expensive and hard earned) bike at the wash bay.
Keep safe,
Neil
