I’ve never driven a Megabus service on which every booked passenger has turned up, there are always no shows. I explained here how Megabus ticketing works so it’s easy to see how much in advance a passenger booked and it’s usually the early bookers with cheap seats who don’t show. The reason for this is that some of them may book a seat on journey for each of several days at £1.00 each. They then travel on the day which is most convenient to them. This is cheaper than waiting until they know which bus they’ll need and booking one more expensive ticket on that service. Some others may have changed circumstances or simply miss the bus.
But recently we’ve seen some strange no show statistics. Last week we had a fully booked (49 seats) on a London to Brighton service – not one passenger showed up!! The return to London was the same, 100% full with bookings but 100% empty on the journey. I had a service on which not one of the first 26 passengers showed up. The question is why? There are a couple of theories, both of which seem to have holes in them to my mind
The first theory is that the bookings are made using stolen/cloned credit cards in order to see if they’ll work. OK, a Megabus seat is a low cost item so it might be a low cost check to see if a card will work. But, all credit card transactions on the Megabus website are processed by WorldPay who are a very big outfit and one I would have expected to notice fraud which appeared to be linked to a specific merchant. The good news is that once WorldPay have accepted the card Megabus get the money so empty seats generated by this way are paid for seats.
The second theory is that some unknown competitor of Megabus may be buying up the low cost seats in order to prevent bona fide passengers getting them. The theory being that if a passenger is never able to get a low cost seat they’ll be less interested in looking for them again and may not use Megabus. Possible, I guess. But buying every seat on a bus means a lot of full price seats will have been purchased as well. Again Megabus receive all the income.
Any other theories out there?
Malcom, in your last post you asked about bloodbus.com. The Driver is looking for a new provider after the old one seemed to mess up the website, in the new one you can’t post anonymously and possibly a new scheme as well? Also in answer to this post, maybe it was a fleet of asian tourists? they always get on the bus on Cambridge and ask to go somewhere the bus doesn’t go, the driver says they don’t go there but they pay for the ticket and sit down anyway…