How Progression Bikes took bike hire self-serve, cut daily admin, and reduced staffing costs with Swellbase

Progression Bikes is a bike hire, guiding and servicing business based in Dunkeld, Perthshire, founded in 2011.

It hires out a fleet spanning electric bikes, kids' bikes, hardtails, and full suspension bikes across every frame size, runs guided rides from family-friendly routes through to black-grade enduro, and offers bike servicing and sales from its shop.

Bike hire is a resource problem before it's a booking problem. Every hire is a specific bike, in a specific size, out for a specific window, often sold with accessories that also have their own capacity constraints.

Before Swellbase, Progression Bikes was running all of it off a web form and a Google Calendar. This created bottlenecks at busy periods and was confusing for customers, resulting in a growing admin problem that needed fixing.

The Challenge

We intentionally left a human element in — it required us to reply with a confirmation so we knew we'd actually had eyes on that booking. Otherwise you get duplications, or someone turns up assuming they're confirmed and we haven't even seen it yet.

A registration of interest form, not a booking. The website form collected everything needed to make a booking, but nothing was actually reserved at the end of it. This resulted in a clunky experience for the customer, no payment taken upfront, and a heavy admin load that presented both as constant processing of form submissions and a higher-rate of phone enquiries from customers who didn’t complete the form.
Manual re-entry into Google Calendar. Each enquiry had to be typed into a calendar by hand and then settled over phone or email.
The confirmation reply was the safety net. Nothing was reserved until someone replied by hand, and that was deliberate — a calendar entry doesn't know a bike is already out. The only thing standing between two customers and the same bike was a person checking.
Customers couldn't self-serve, because they didn't know what to ask for. Prog Bikes has two distinct customer types: those who know the experience they want but not the bike, and those who know the exact bike they’re after. Those who weren’t sure on the bike weren’t well served by the form, and these bookings always required conversations on what best suited.
The busiest days were the worst days. Several groups and hire pickups arriving at the same time meant chaos in the shop, with additional staff drafted in to handle these periods throughout the day.

The Solution

Progression Bikes went live on Swellbase on 1 May 2026. Ahead of that, we went down to Dunkeld to visit the shop and map the hire flow around how customers actually buy — with the core insight that for Progression, everything is a hire, and the hire product is the primary product.

We worked in partnership with Progression to develop our robust and specific hire feature with the flexibility that hire needs — Swellbase does not shoehorn equipment hire into our activities structure.

Booking

Browse by experience or by bike. The booking flow branches at the first screen, so customers who know they want an easy family ride and customers who know they want a full-suspension electric both land in the right place. Bikes can sit in more than one experience category.
Live availability in the booking flow. Customers can see how many of each item are left, rather than finding out after they've asked.
Upsells scoped to the right item. Panniers only appear on hardtails and gravel bikes; range extenders only appear on electric. The upsell sits inside the hire item, not a level above it.
Book a guide at the point of hire. Progression's most common upsell, offered at the moment the customer is already deciding.
Multi-day durations with custom pricing. Set different hire lengths with their own rates, and link multiple days into one booking.
Payment taken at the point of booking. A hire is paid for and confirmed before anyone arrives.

Operations

Every bike is a tracked resource. Bike types and sizes are connected to checkout questions, so a booking consumes a specific bike from the fleet. The system can't sell the same bike twice.
Equipment attached to calendar notes. Specific bikes can be pulled out of circulation for maintenance or an event without having to fake an admin booking to hold them.
The old website form, rebuilt as checkout fields and waivers. The details Progression already collected — including emergency contacts — now arrive automatically attached to the booking or collected by our waiver system post-booking. No more form field overload, instead a step-by-step experience that is easy to understand and use for customers.

The Results

We'd get extra people in just to help out at the start or the end of the day — and telling someone to come in for an hour, then come back five hours later for another hour, is really tricky. Now the booking end is automated you just do the prep and it's done. We're saving half an hour at the busiest times each day, and I can manage the busy periods with fewer staff, which saves me money.

Around half an hour saved at the busiest times, purely from the booking end being automated. The admin that used to sit between an enquiry and a confirmed hire is gone, so the day's work is prep rather than processing.
The busy periods run on fewer staff. Progression used to draft extra people in to cover the collection and return peaks — an awkward ask when it means an hour in the morning, five hours off, then another hour at the end of the day. With the bookings handled up front, those peaks are manageable with the team already on shift.
No double bookings. Keeping track of the hire fleet is Swellbase’s job now, not a memory test that’s prone to error when there’s 20 customers waiting in the shop.
Easy staff assignments. When guided trips are booked, Progression can easily assign available staff to the timeslot or calendar note on Swellbase, and the guide instantly has access to all the information they need.
Customers are commenting on the booking process. Progression had customers who struggled with the old form. Since the switch, a number of customers have given unprompted positive feedback on their booking experience.

Testimonial

It's made things easier for us, it's saving us money, and if we have a problem it's easy to get hold of support and it's quickly solved. Somewhere else you're dealing with a bot and it might never get resolved. It's not just the contact, it's the actual resolution — you sorted three things just now while we were on the phone.

—Adam Flint (Owner at Progression Bikes)

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