City e-bike tour

Had a great time - the bikes were really good and even though we did some decent hills it was no problem at all. I wouldn’t suggest this ride to be for someone not reasonably confident in cycling as you’re among the traffic at times, although plenty of bike lanes and not busy. Guide was good - shared interesting facts and kept it interesting.

We had a great time on this e-bike tour with Nicole. She had great energy, and you could tell she really loves her city. We saw the most important sites of the city and got a lot of interesting, succinct information. (More than our Old town walking tour we had done before!). Most of all, we had fun going “turbo” speed up and down the streets of Zurich. It was one of our top memories from our Switzerland week!

To start with, I am a VERY experienced cyclist (multiple century rides, multiple one-day 150+ mile cycling courses completed, one 200-mile course completed in one day, etc), but those experiences were completed using light, responsive carbon fiber road bikes on open road courses. This experience is not that! This was riding on e-bikes that weighed probably 80 pounds, through heavy city afternoon rush-hour traffic, with little to know practice prep time for those of us who have never ridden e-bikes. Why not make this ride earlier on the day to avoid heavy traffic?! We received a short explanation of the bikes and then our "practice" consisted of riding up the parking garage ramp to street level before mixing it up with heavy car, bike, tram, pedestrian, dog, stroller, and tourist traffic. Since we were riding in a line, I stayed at the back because I was feeling very uncertain and unsafe on my bike and I didn't want to put anyone else in our group in jeopardy. There was a super brand new guide behind me who evidenced her own challenges with managing her own bike. Since I was at the back, other cyclists or cars would cut some us of from the group by riding through our line of participants, causing us to be cut off from the group and thus requiring us to play catch-up, while still trying to get accustomed to these heavy, unwieldy bikes. I finally had enough and started to feel so unsafe when it started to rain, that I asked if the new guide could take me back early. She did, with my husband coming back with us, but on one occasion stopped to ask us if we remembered the way we had come. What?!!! To make matters worse, when we requested a refund for this experience from Viator, through whom we had booked this experience, due to feeling ill-prepared and unsafe, they refused to do so. When I tried to reach out to the e-bike vendor directly through the Viator app, twice, I wasn't even given the civilty of a returned message. My recommendation... Do this experience only if you are very familiar with big city rush-hour traffic, and only if you are comfortable with heavy drop-tube style e-bikes. Otherwise, you may be in for 2.5 hours of very scary riding and/or putting yourself at risk for accident or injury. Oh, and if you have a bad experience, just know that your money is clearly more important to this vendor than your satisfaction or your sense of wellbeing.