On June 8th, I contacted Wheel Base via their website. Over the next week I conversed with them about our plans to get a ride up Vail Pass and then bike to Frisco and then back to their shop in Lionshead. After working out the cost and details, I asked if there was anything else to confirm my reservation for my wife and me. I provided them with the additional requests, which was a phone number and our heights for bike sizing. We were all set for the 11 am tour after providing this information.
A few weeks later we arrived to Vail and the evening before our tour the weather looked iffy. Our hotel's concierge suggested we call Wheel Base to see if we could pay an additional fee to start earlier in the day. When I called them, Wheelbase said we did not have a reservation and they would not even be offering the tour to Vail Pass despite that we had made a reservation three weeks before. They said they had us pencilled in for a different tour that would be much less challenging (15 miles all downhill in Glenwood Canyon) and there was no way they could accommodate us since the tours were in different areas. We had trained for the past few weeks to do the 42 mile trip up the east side of Vail Pass, and we had worked out with Wheel Base over several emails exactly what this would entail. They said while they had dropped the ball there was nothing they could do. We were already pretty screwed by them, but we would have been totally screwed over if we hadn't called the day before due to the weather. We would've arrived at the shop at 10:30 to find no tour and no other options (we waited the last day for our big ride to acclimatize better to Vail).
Will from Wheel Base said that even if I wrote a bad review it would not hurt their business and they just didn't care. I was pretty upset at this point so my wife talked to Will. Will reiterated that despite our emails with Wheel Base, they would not be taking us. She did get him to call another bike shop next door. He called back and said this other shop would take us on the tour. However, when we called that new shop, they didn't have the details of what we wanted to do (there is the regular tour that is all downhill and much shorter, whereas we wanted to also go uphill). Will did not make the full arrangements for us and the new bike shop now wanted to charge us close to triple the price Wheel Base quoted.
We frantically called around and found a new shop on our own that did not try to take advantage of us. We explained the whole story to them and they were so accommodating and understanding. After all, we had trained for weeks and travelled from Texas to do this bike ride, and Wheel Base nearly ruined our entire vacation.
Our tour with Wheelbase was supposed to be the highlight of our big trip to Vail. It was a total nightmare. read more