What is everyones thoughts on the seat reservations on Flixbus?
Do you prefer to have them or not?
When I see the new 066 service around Stratford, it’s not doing particularly well. Most buses are pretty empty and the service isn’t being well advertised. I think it will be withdrawn sooner rather than later.
I've been doing a trial run of commuting *to* Stratford on this route for the last couple of weeks. It seems to leave Cambridge with about a dozen people, deposit most of them at Stratford, and then pick up about another dozen. If they've paid much the same as what I have then we're not paying for the driver and diesel, let alone a share of the cost of a c£200k coach! (even ignoring a cut for FlixBus).
In theory it has much to commend it against the train: In advance it's about the same price as the train, closer to the time it's often much cheaper. You can get on and sit down and fall asleep and not worry about changing. Even if you accept that the timetabled journey time is "ambitious" it's not going to be much slower than the train. The seats are about the same as those on the train. It introduces two new departure points that may be more, as or less convenient than the two stations depending on you. Sure the M11 will go to pot about once a month, but then so does the West Anglia Mainline, so whatever (and you'll be sitting on the bus, rather than risking getting turfed off a train at Stortford or something).
The two things that kill it for me:
- I was not expecting the departures from Cambridge to be so unreliable. I assumed that it would be the first coach of the day and that it would generally leave on time. It's once been nearly on time, and it's been up to 25m late. You also can't track this delay and have no idea if the coach is on the way / where it is.
- They are surprisingly aggressive towards people that refuse to reserve seats. They will absolutely put you in an aisle seat next to a random stranger on an otherwise empty bus. However I am not going to pay to reserve a seat as suddenly it is more expensive than an advance ticket on the train. This is even before considering that a surprising number of seats have suspicious stains and a random seat may not be where you want to sit!
And the thing that may kill it for other people:
- How are you supposed to know it exists? I'm on their rader for targetted FB ads, and I keep getting AI nonsense like adverts for Harthill Services or random stops by fields in Europe. We know it exists because we're into that kind of thing. But Joe Public can't even put "Stratford" into the Flixbux Website! They're target market is people that know to go onto their website and think they'd be willingto take a coach to London even though they secretly wanted to / are willing to go to Stratford instead. Really?
- It really is running quite late; sometimes close to 1 hour late.
- I'm also surprised by the quality of the maintenance of the coaches. As well as suspicious stains on seats and surfaces just often not well presented I've had a seat that wasn't securely bolted to the floor and a seat stuck in moving between reclining and not reclining mode.
Someone in this thread said Evri of coaches. That's what I'm feeling.
