A few months ago I had to travel to Derby for a meeting. It was not in walking distance of the station, and I usually prefer to avoid taxis, so I looked at buses.
As an outsider, I found the website quite unintuitive. This is because everywhere else I go, I can work out which route number I need to get to my destination, and then work back from there. You can't do that with Trent Barton because they mostly don't have numbers for individual routes, and the brands (which mostly apply to groups of routes) are a poor substitute. It's not the end of the world, I figured it out eventually, and it probably makes sense if you're used to it, but I don't understand why they can't have a straightforward route numbering system alongside the brands like every other bus company in the country.
So I got to Derby made my way to the bus stop. The first bus didn't turn up. The second bus arrived at the stop and the driver shut it down and wondered off leaving it parked there for several minutes, at which point the third bus arrived, overtook the second bus and drove off empty. I'm not sure what happened next as I then had to go and find a taxi to avoid being late.
On the way back I did actually manage to get a bus. The on board information screens and announcements were broken. Also, since it didn't serve the station I asked the driver where buses to the station went from and he had no idea! Bizarre.
The bus to the station, it turned out, was a "Skylink". At least that seemed to work fairly well. Although the information screens and announcements were also broken on this one.
This would be a poor show for any bus company, and is diabolical for the self-styled "really good" one. If this is the sort of experience regular passengers can expect, it is no wonder if people are going out of their way to avoid using them.
