03.05
The BBC reports that National Express coaches want their particular form of transport to be viewed as cool – even as a suitable form of business travel…
National Express chief executive Richard Bowker wants coach travel in Britain to be like Spain, where the company’s subsidiary, Alsa, carries business people between cities. In Spain, coach travel is “cool and acceptable” says Mr Bowker.
A very noble ambition, but I can only assume that Spain’s equivalent coach system hasn’t suffered from years of neglect like ours here in the UK. Nor do they have the rudest, sometimes simply nasty staff like we do in the UK.
As someone who lives in Brighton and travels from Heathrow a lot, I’m sometimes left with no choice but to use the coaches of the ‘National Express‘ company. Believe me, when I say ‘no choice’, it’s exactly that. If there was a sensible choice then I wouldn’t go near them at all.
The coaches are dirty, smelly, filthy and tatty inside. I even go as far as to not rest my head against the headrest because of the sticky residue on every part of the seat. The toilets are disgusting and the smell inside is vomit-inducing in all but the strongest of stomached people. I’ve ridden great distances in the back of an army Bedford truck in my time and even that is pleasant compared to one of these coaches.
The worst part however, are the staff. I don’t want to paint everyone with the same appalling brush, but it’s hard not to when the examples I’ve had the misfortune to come across must simply be the very worst of their breed. I get the impression that the National Express is where people go to work when even the normal bus system is too high class for them. They are rude, unhelpful and often appear to be aggressive to people who’s native language is not English. In fact, National Express staff have demonstrated the very worst behaviour I have ever seen in people who supposedly work in a service industry on several sorry times when I’ve had the misfortune to have to use their system.
I pity the management if they are truly going to try and change how things are there. The attitude that the staff display seems to be endemic and I imagine it will be very hard to eradicate. I’ve maintained, for years, that is someone who knew how to run a successful public transport service (Mr Branson are you listening?) came along and went into competition, they would kill National Express in months.
I have also maintained that we should force National Express to change their name to National Disgrace to be more representative of their true nature.
Technorati Tags: nationalexpress, transport, travel
Here, Here.
When i was at Uni, we discovered National Express and we started to used them instead of the very dodgy replacement bus service for British Rail.
For the first couple of trips they were fine (altho only the brave ventured into the toilets). On my last trip with them. Cheryl and I had just got back from Paris on the eurostar at 10pm we made our way over to Victoria to get the late night National Express back to Manchester. After we had put our bags in back of the bus we were told we could not travel because the bus was now full. Even though we had booked our tickets for that very bus.
The guy was who kicked us off was pretty hostile too and didn’t appricate the fact that he had just stranded us in london at around midnight through no fault of our own.
Luckily a friend came to the rescue and put us up for night and we got the very first bus the morning after.
We have never used National Express since…