Don’t bother doing this guided bike tour, it is awful. We were looking forward to this. On arrival, we were shouted at by the unfriendly guy, behind the counter, He was the guy you had to give your reservation details to. Welcome to New York! Very disorganised inside , no clear instructions on what to do. Nobody seemed to know who was on a guided tour, who had just hired bikes, who was hiring a scooter etc? We then went outside to collect our bikes for the tour, luckily there was a sweet older guy who helped us with our bikes. Also, the bikes were not the ones advertised on the website, the website shows bikes with baskets, and I think, it is even a different shopfront, to the one on the website. We actually thought we were in the wrong shop. Very dingy inside. Fancy Apple, I think not.
The tour was supposed to start at ten, but it didn’t. We waited outside in the cold for 20 minutes, with our bikes, on the side of the pavement. When the guide turned up there was no apology. We didn’t even know he had arrived! We were facing one way and just happened to turn around, and there he was speaking to the other people at the back of the queue ! He didn’t seem to know how many people were on the trip, or if we were expecting more people. When we finally got into the park we were given a brief introduction to it, and then off we went. I felt really sorry for a family who were in the group with us. The young daughter and her mother, were on e-scooters, and quite clearly, you could see that they wouldn’t be able to keep up with us, on our bikes. The dad and young son were on bikes. So about 5 minutes into the ride, there was only the son keeping up with the rest of the group, god knows where the rest of the family were, so the tour guides friend, went to look for them, whilst we all waited. When the friend came back, he said to the son, “they aren’t carrying on with the tour”, meaning the young sons parents. There was no way they would be able to safely keep up with us on e-scooters. So off our group went and the son was just left there alone in Central Park, to go back and try and find his family on his own! The tour guide, or his friend should have stayed with him, until they were all safely reunited. Unbelievable! It didn’t help that our guide was wearing dark colours, so you couldn’t even easily pick him out in the crowd, if you weren’t managing to keep up. We did another stop, where we could take pictures of the lake etc. The guide wanted to go on a different route, so at this point we decided to leave the tour and cycle around on our own, which was much more fun.! We got the bikes back in time, however, we had paid just under 100 dollars for a guided tour and that was not what we got. I would definitely advise people just to hire a city bike, which are everywhere , just outside the park entrances. You can then go explore by yourself. Its very safe in the park, there are lots of families with pushchairs, horses and carriages, joggers, street performer’s, hot dog stands etc. The Park is lovely. I can’t understand all the good reviews about this company on here. A complete rip off in my opinion. Disappointed, because we really thought it would be good.