From today, users can now share the experience of riding the world’s most iconic roads with others, whether preparing for an IRONMAN on your chosen race route, exploring the climbs of the Grand Tours or tackling exotic locations on the other side of the world.
Indoor cycling is inherently a lonely experience, often spent grinding in the pain cave with little more than a fan and a heads-up display for company. ROUVY is changing that experience for its users thanks to shared interactions before, during and after your rides.
ROUVY’s extensive library of real-world routes, spanning every corner of the globe, allow riders to explore the world without leaving home. Until now, connecting with other riders was limited to the avatars sharing the route, without the possibility of interactions with the hundreds of thousands of other ROUVY riders along the way.
Thanks to the introduction of ROUVY’s new In-Ride Chat, Clubs and Communities features, users can now engage with other riders, both within their existing networks and from further afield.
In-Ride Chat
ROUVY users can now engage in live discussions with other riders on their chosen routes thanks to the in-ride chat feature. Riders can join in the conversation using either the Companion App or within the AR App itself, with the option of turning the chat off when focus is required.
This helps alleviate the monotony of those long solo Zone 2 training rides, whilst also allowing riders to discuss the route and share inspiration for other rides to discover in ROUVY.
Clubs
Bring together and take on your friends or club mates in the new ROUVY Clubs feature. For riders who want to have a dedicated space for discussion, motivation and competition.
The new Clubs feature in ROUVY features a weekly leaderboard between members, as well as club chat and discussion feeds to drive interaction between riders.
ROUVY Clubs can be set up as open communities that anyone can join, or as private groups where members join by invitation — keeping things personal and close-knit. Each club holds up to 30 members, and can be discovered via the AR App, the Companion App or the Rider Portal.
Communities
Bringing riders together within official brand channels, event series discussions, common goals and many other shared topics, ROUVY’s new Communities offer a much broader level of engagement between users within the App.
Unlike the more intimate Clubs feel, ROUVY’s new Communities allow users to become a member of various groups featuring a communications feed related to the Community itself - whether riders preparing for their next IRONMAN discussing the race route in a dedicated community, or fans of Lidl-Trek and Visma | Lease-a-Bike connecting through official team communities and sharing group rides and events.
All Communities are open for anyone to join, and the discussion feeds can be set to either be open for all or curated posts only. Each Community will have an Owner, whilst others can be invited as Curators, with all Communities discoverable via the AR App, the Companion App or the Rider Portal.
Quotes
“Developing and fostering engagement between our community members is something that we’ve been working on for some time, fuelled by feedback from our users,” explained Marek-Martin Matyska, VP of Product at ROUVY. “With the new Chat, Clubs and Communities features, ROUVY users can now finally group and bond, which we believe will continue to motivate riders to keep going, riding further and harder, after all Cycling always was and will be a social activity and it was about time that we brought that major aspect to ROUVY! We are strong believers that riding and exploring the world together brings a new aspect to how people ride on ROUVY!”
ROUVY partners Lidl-Trek and Team Visma | Lease a Bike will be amongst the organisations creating Communities.
Herman Ten Kate (Head of Marketing & E-commerce) of Team Visma | Lease a Bike: “The new functionality provides a really smart way for us as a team to engage with our fans around the world on ROUVY and to bring them together around our virtual Group Rides and during races throughout the calendar, too. We’re looking forward to building and developing the Team Visma | Lease a Bike ROUVY community and conversation.”
This new collection of community features follows the recent update of the ROUVY Companion App 2.0 during an exciting time of increased user engagement on the app. The recently revamped Companion App 2.0 allows users to track their outdoor activities alongside their indoor training, contributing to an overall fitness score. The result is a more complete approach to training, including plans which cover both indoor and outdoor riding.
New users can register for a free 7-day trial to experience ROUVY in full, before selecting between either monthly or yearly plans, with single, duo and group options available.
Supporting imagery can be downloaded here.