….. 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.
Oh and I think it needed hiding because there is a good chance that there were only two tickets to Coventry on the list, and that they had not been ticked off so the driver didn’t want us to find out that it would be easy for him to check out at least partially the story.
I did say to him that if he could show that his list didn’t have anybody booked to Coventry then it might suggest the booking hadn’t been made properly but he wouldn’t do it!
I think this was a case of being obstructive rather than helpful. I also think because Steve had done his big man act and said ‘you are not getting on the bus’ that he was frightened of being proved wrong and/or ‘backing down’ .. oh the egos of controllers!
Hi Malcolm,
Thanks for this response! The customer services have sort of seen me right…in that they have (after a bit of twisting) refunded the cost of the journey, but they are doing little about the £83 we had to spend to get home 3 hours late – we didn’t have another option apart from a hotel room which would have been more expensive.
I have checked the booking system by making another booking for a journey in November, and in this case, whilst I got two numbers, the code ommitted the start and destination codes, so I suspect there is a fault with the website that explains the fact that there was only one number available for me to write down.
It still shows that a quick call from the driver/controller would have resolved it!
Thanks for advice and info.
J
Hi
That’s a very sorry tale :-(
I can’t comment on the specifics because I wasn’t there. But it may help if I explain how booking references are generated and what the driver’s list contains.
A booking reference will look something like:-
12-2506-290807-M5-1700-BRI-LON
or
12/13-2506-290807-M5-1700 etc.
The 12 indicates that this was the 12th seat to be booked on the journey. If two seats have been booked the 12/13 indicates the 12th and 13th seats to be booked. Three seats would 12/14 and so on. The next number, 2506 in the above example, is simply a unique computer generated number. If these first two parts match the driver’s list then no one need look further.
The rest is only confirmation of the booking details. 290807 is the date of the booked journey, the service is the M5 service at 17:00, leaving London and going to Brighton.
The driver’s list contains only these numbers – no names, no email addresses, no Worldpay references. Nothing but our unique booking references for the journey. I can’t therefore think why it needs hiding :-(
Have you written to Customer Services via the website or ‘phoned them on 0900 160 0900 (10p/min from landlines)? If you had bought two and paid for two seats but only got a reference for one seat, and were denied boarding, I’m pretty sure they will ‘see you alright’! If you know what I mean.
Dear Megabus driver!
How refreshing to see a good attitude. I agree with your decision to let someone on who couldn’t book – but the same professionalism and understanding is not always displayed…
A friend and I were due to come up from London by megabus this weekend. When I booked, the website only gave me one number + the worldpay number, which I took down.
When I boarded for the return journey I showed the reference to the driver who promptly hid his list and said ‘that doesn’t prove you bought a ticket – (I found at later why (that two numbers should have come up for the booking not just one).
The controller (Steve?) then stuck his oar in and said ‘there’s no way you are travelling on my bus’ and ‘we can’t let just anyone chance onto the bus’ I asked if there was a way to check the booking and he said yes, but I’m not going to use it. He then tried to talk loudly about how I hadn’t paid in order to get the bus onside against me.
The driver also refused to look at his list, (I think on instruction from Steve) pretending he didn’t have one.
This was the last bus from London, and we were left stuck in London. My friend was visiting from Italy and is learning English so it was worse for him.
Eventually we paid an exhortionate amount to get back to Coventry (£83) which is nearly the same price as a taxi for the same journey, which I think is outrageous.