….. not being able to sell MegaBus tickets on the bus. A couple of weeeks ago every MegaBus driver attended a customer care course which placed great emphasis on making everything about MegaBus easy and pleasant for our customers. How once a customer wasn’t happy and used an alternative that may well be the last we saw of them etc. How the first impression they got of MegaBus was the one they’d remember. I had to think hard and fast about both these aspects of customer care this morning.

At 6.00am this morning the first person to get on the bus wanted to buy a ticket to London. We’ve never been able to sell tickets on the bus or to take any money and hand it in. I apologised and explained that, stupidly as it seemed to me, we couldn’t charge people on the bus and the tickets had to be pre-booked online. The potential passenger then said but I’ve been online and it says your booking system is currently closed for maintenance – this is perfectly true in the early hours before 7:00am. “I couldn’t buy online which is why I’m here now wanting to buy on the bus”. There were two options open to me. The first would be to tell him that the National Express bus to London would stop at this stop in 40 minutes time and that National Express can sell tickets on the bus. The second would be to give him a free ride to London on the basis he’d tried to buy a ticket and it wasn’t his fault that MegaBus couldn’t provide an operative way to take his money.

I gave him the free ride but I’m so frustrated that we couldn’t just ticket him somehow and get some money! I’m very conscious that unless passengers use and pay for the service we, the drivers, wont have a job and therefore wont get paid.

As I understand it a major foot in the door for Google rankings is to have a sitemap.xml file located in your site’s top level directory. Simple I thought, I’ll do a quick google on how to generate one and that’ll be it. Two days later I’ve got there! During this time I tried half a dozen online sitemap generators and downloaded both free and trial versions of paid for generators. There was something wrong with everyone of them! Until I found:-

Click here to go to the website.

This is the best sitemap generator out there! And it’s free. It’s so good that immediately after using it I made a $15.00 donation to the guy who wrote it.

Since a blog changes everytime a posting is made the sitemap needs rebuilding and updating to reflect the added content. A nice feature of GSiteCrawler is that it can be automated, I haven’t yet set this up but when I do it will generate a new sitemap each night and upload it to my server automagically :-)

Here’s the list of pages currently included in my sitemap.

I’ve just got home from work and during the drive home (M3 southbound) I overtook a fantastic bus. It was a double decker with a great paint job in gold, tri-axle with all wheels chromed and dark tinted glass. Since it was dusk a lot of colour monitors, on both decks, showed through the dark glass. I’d spotted it ahead of me and had a hard time catching it up, it was certainly over the legal speed limit on the flat! As I drew level I could see that it was left hand drive and as I got in front I saw the destination ‘Las Vegas’! It didn’t have UK licence plates and was being driven on ‘trade plates’. I guess it was headed for Southampton Docks to be shipped to the US.

I don’t think I’ve spotted a new Megabus on it’s way to the US West Coast where a Las Vegas service is about to start. This bus was far too classy to be a Megabus ;-)

Yesterday I posted about the unhappy Megabus customer in the US who was taking a trip from Chicago to Milwaukee. It’s brought back many memories for me of driving up Interstate 94 from Chicago to Milwaukee. I used to fly into O’Hare from London, hire a car, and then drive to Milwaukee. One time there was a big thunderstorm over Chicago and we circled for sometime before landing, all the time I was thinking “please divert to Mitchell Field, Milwaukee. It”ll save me the drive!”. The approach into O’Hare is beautifull on a clear day, over the lake, and then that view of downtown Chicago! On the drive up to Milwaukee there’s a place whose name I can’t remember where there’s a large shopping mall, it’s just inside either Illinois or Wisconsin – either way it’s just inside the State with the lower sales tax and as such attracts custom from the other State. Can anyone remind me of its name? I used to stop there most times and usually bought a few things.

I like Milwaukee very much, downtown has a wonderful mix of old and modern skyscrapers. I recall one modern skyscraper clad totally in blue glass which then reflects an older skyscraper in stone. Truly beautiful. The waterfront is great too. For Europeans it’s just like a very attractive seaside port with marinas, the ‘sea’ has waves but it doesn’t taste salty! And Milwaukee is home to both Harley Davidson and Miller beer, it can’t get better than that.

I miss that place!! Wonder if there’s any chance of tranfering from Megabus in the UK to Megabus US? I know where the Mid-West Convention Center is, if that helps. Do Megabus stop there? I see Megabus are starting service on the West coast in the next few days unfortunately I don’t know that area. But if they consider NYC as a base and run upstate to Syracuse, Albany, Rochester etc then I’m their man! I know that area even better than running up and down Inerstate 94.

I’ve just had another memory … the licence plates all declare ‘Wisconsin the dairy capital of the United States’. But butter, for breakfast toast, is as scarce as hen’s teeth in any hotel in Wisconsin. You only get low fat spread slime … maybe I don’t want a transfer there!

“Your choice: A bus company that boasts a sleek, fast greyhound as its company mascot… or one (above) that uses a chubby, rosy-cheeked (possibly drunk?) chipper middle-aged Fisher Price weeble?”.

“Of course, that chubby mascot may charge you just $1 one-way to San Francisco, writes the L.A. Times:”.

Thank you Franklin Avenue. Personally, I’ve always had concerns about Sid. He doesn’t look like the kind of man I’d be happy leaving my kids with …. if you know what I mean!

This has just been posted on YouTube.

Refusing to let the passenger have their luggage at the end of the journey was the most stupid thing he could do. As it was the passenger got their luggage back after he’d finally determined the guy’s ticket number. But what if the guy hadn’t had a valid ticket for that trip, would he have taken the guy’s luggage back to the depot as compensation? Ticket problems need sorting out BEFORE you depart and preferably before the passenger even sits down on the bus, a lesson I learned last week.

A passenger got on in Brighton and couldn’t find her ticket in the tardis she was using as a handbag. Because the queue behind her was long I said she should sit down and show me her ticket before we left. After checking all the other tickets I’d forgotten about her. I then added up the number of tickets I’d checked and did a head count – one more head than tickets! Even this didn’t prompt me to remember the woman with a sack for a handbag so I apologised to everyone saying I’d probably made a mistake but I needed to see everyone’s ticket again. When I got to the handbag woman she handed me a National Express ticket to Gatwick!