Like with the other rider who commented, Eaglerider also fouled up our reservation (which we corrected) and then made an unannounced bike substitution (which was take-it-or-leave-it). It was the same kind of bike, so we took it. Not only did they not inform us of the change beforehand, but two Eaglerider employees had inconsistent stories for us as to what had happened.
Several weeks before a planned trip, we reserved with Allison a particular white HD soft tail that had 300 miles on it. Antonio, the mechanic, had shown it to us and I had sat on it to check the comfort of the controls. We picked it from among the other soft tails because it had low miles on it. In checking up on the reservation a couple weeks later, we discovered that Allison apparently got the date for the trip wrong. We suspect that she had not properly recorded the reservation at all. Earlier, they had misspelled our last name on a gift certificate my wife had bought for me for Father's Day. We corrected the spelling when we made the initial reservation, but our name was still misspelled when we checked on the reservation later. Had we not confirmed and corrected the reservation, we have no doubt we would have been out of luck on the day we showed up for the ride.
As it was, on the day of the ride Allison offered us a black version of the soft tail with 32K miles on it. When we asked why the change, she told us that the white one had been in a wreck. Accepting this story, we went out on the substitute. An hour into the ride, the engine started backfiring and would not idle. During the whole trip, I had to keep the revs up at stop lights to keep it from stalling. What a pain. Also, the pipes apparently were custom. They were loud, high and hot, to the point that my wife had to ride with her foot on the saddlebag to keep the pipes from burning her leg through her pants.
Antonio greeted us on our return on Sunday. One of the two white soft tails was outside (in perfect shape) and I asked him where the other one was. He said it was out. I asked him why we did not get the white one he had shown us. He said that we were reserved for a black one that had crashed. I reminded him of the day we picked the white one (their inventory #59) and that it is specified on our written reservation. Abandoning his earlier story, he said he did not work in reservations and did not know what had happened. I mentioned the backfiring and idle problem and he said it might have been caused by the custom pipes.
This obviously leaves some questions, like: What bike, if any, actually crashed? Why did Eaglerider rent to someone else the low-miles white one that they committed to reserve for us? Why did Eaglerider not tell us before our trip of the change? Why did Allison and Antonio tell us inconsistent stories about what actually happened?
Getting the gift certificate should have been a forwarning. Allison left every impression on the phone that she was both uninterested in what she was doing and knew very little how to accomplish it.
When so much planning goes into a bike trip, it is completely unacceptable to us that so much apparently can go wrong with a reservation at Eaglerider. This time we got a bike substantially similar to the one we reserved, thankfully. But we could just as easily have wound up with nothing acceptable, like the other rider who commented. Given Eaglerider's demonstrated inability to get and keep reservations straight, and its utter lack of communication with the rider when things go wrong, we do not trust Eaglerider with our precious vacation planning. We would rather not ride, than to plan on and make major commitments for a ride and then be disappointed. Sorry, we will look elsewhere for our next ride. read more
