Finally the twins are together! Had to order new tyres after killing the Maxxis Rekon bead just before the lockdown.
Ordered a pair of my favourite tyres from Rosebikes in Germany. Always great service and a tyre price that beats everyone else.
However, this time there was a hitch. The two tyres arrived within a week but one of the tyres was defective. There was no return label in the box - which I was used to from ordering from rosebikes.de but this was an order from rosebikes.es in accordance with their new setup.
Sent an email to their helpdesk and got a response to mail the tyre back. Now mailing tyres from Spain is a bit of an oddity. They seem to be treated specially and I wasn't keen spending 40€ to mail back a tyre which cost me 36€...
So I wrote to rosebikes again to explain this. I got an email back saying to just mail the tyre back and they would replace it.
Now, up to this point I'd been writing in English because all the Rosebikes correspondence was in English. It's at that point that I switched to my mother's tongue. Unfortunately my German is, shall we say, profane at best.
This did elicit an instant reponse which pointed me to Section 12 of their Terms and Conditions, where there is a greyed out button saying "
Italia" (they'd sent me the Italian website link
but, ho hum, we've got a result)
A click on the button and out pops a prepaid return voucher. A quick trip to the post office and there's return label generated by Correos to the value of 46€
for payment by Rosebikes on receipt of goods.
A couple of days later I got a credit note and the following day an email to say that my replacement tyre had been dispatched by express courier.
A hat tip to Rosebikes for being patient with me. I should have realised that their helpdesk staff are working remotely and can't easily refer to each other - they were very probably just passing everything through google translate. (I should have clicked when the email was signed by "Boris". I mean, what sort of Englishman is called Boris
).
I did apologise for the missile I'd launched in their direction and felt guilty about losing my temper so quickly (perhaps I need to go back on the tablets?
).
So, no damage done from my side - I haven't been able to ride and am not allowed to visit my garage to do a tyre change anyway, because of the lockdown. I do feel rather sorry for Rosebikes that the cost of two outward couriers and one return courier probably equated to the value of the whole purchase.
I've used Rosebikes for around 15 years and can still heartily recommend them. Especially for tyres.
