National Express Coach

Me, my wife and out 10-month old boy were going from London Victoria courch station to Luton Airport and the journey was disrupted by traffic congestion on 19/04/2024 evening. This caused me and my family an overall delay of95 minutes to Luton Airport. According to NationalExpress clock, it was 88 minutes only. Anyhow, it was the last plane to Amsterdam that day and I had to rebook a flight for the 3 of us and a hotel. It cost me around 400€ and NationalExpress says that I should have put 3 hours between the arrival time into the airport and the flight departure time instead of 2,5 hours. Who goes to the airport for an EasyJet flight without check-in luggage before 3 hours? If I had done so, we would have missed the flight anyways, but NationalExpress do not listen to you. They found a reason not to reimburse and they hide behind it.

This is not the worst thing yet. They also say that I should have contacted to the Control Centre which would have then advised me on the most appropriate action to take or arrange for alternative means of transportation to your ticketed destination. However, I did called them around the 60th minutes of the delay and they advised me to call EasyJet maybe they can keep the gate open for us. Even we called them, they assume we did not called them all.

I WOULD NEVER EVER USE IT AGAIN, I WISH I HAVE NOT USED THEM BEFORE

My wife and i bought a ticket from heathrow T4 to Bournemouth with National Express after a very long flight. The attendent at the airport came out and declared to the crowd of 30 of us that our coach will not be arriving. He told us that we all will be getting on to the coach to portsmouth and they will be dropping us off in southampton and a further coach will be getting us to bournemouth. We ask for the guarantee of this and he said the national express will never leave anyone stranded i promise. When we got to southampton there was a coach but with not enough room for all of us. 17 of us were left in southampton andf told taxis or a coach will be with us in 5 minutes. the crowd left of 17 people included a family of 5 with a small baby who didnt speak english and anther couple with a baby and 2 young 16 year old girls who were here from switzerland. Without a care in the world for any of these people National Express left us all stranded without anyone turning up after 45 minutes.. We all scrabbled around trying to flag down taxis to arrange transport but when we left there was still a family of 5 left there at midnight. Getting home at 1am nearly 3 hours after we should of was a disgrace. I contacted customer services today and they stated taxis were sent and i advised that was untrue as we were there waiting. I asked to speak to a manager who first said he would refund my ticket and taxi but went back on his word and said later that he would not refund the ticket as he got us half way home. Outrageous.I then asked to go through to the complaints dept and was told that now i had dealt with him then he would not put me through to a complaints dept as he dealt with it. I then asked for the name of the taxi company he said he had paid to collect us . He told me they did not know the taxi company. This is the same taxi company he said they had paid to pick us up that did not arrive but he did not know who they were ???!??! . The fact this company left so many families stranded and offer no apology or damages for this is disgusting. luckily we had good people in the group that helped out the people whose first impression of our country was this disgrace of a company. Like me if you were one of this group contact trading standards and lodge a complaint so this does not happen to other families or youngsters . National Express you should be ashamed !!!!

Today 18/08/22 my mother was left stranded at a bus stop in Coventry and called me panicking. She said that her coach came but left her without stopping. Due to the train strike she was left there. I called customer service and spoke to a nice guy. He informed me that I would have to change the ticket with £6 fee and the next bus would arrive to London at 11:30 as it’s not direct. I said that I could not make that decision on my mothers behalf so I asked him if he could call me back in 10 minutes after I’ve spoken to my mother.

He called me back 15 minutes later and informed me that he has already spoken to my mum and got her a new ticket for the next day. He was very sympathetic and extremely helpful who went beyond to help us. My mother felt betrayed by the driver but quickly regained her faith in kindness thanks to him.

I hope he knows how truly he made our day.

I was going to write an obscene review saying how I really feel, but I was not allowed to add various words into my review by this website, so I've decided instead to do a proper, British review which I hike will get across the point of the company resembling excrament. Let me just say if there was any other way to get from Canterbury to London, I would take it, because national express even with its student discounts is incredibly expensive and they search for any possible way to, shall we say given the word restrictions, have affairs you over. The only redeeming factor is that most, but certainly not all, bus drivers are nice. The same cannot be said for customer service people who will be unsympathetic to any simple mistake you make, and charge you more than double the cost of your ticket. They make ebinizar Scrooge look like mahatma Ghandi. Now all the same, ideally I'd want to meet with the CEO of national express as it would be a dream come true. Only a temporary suspension of the law surrounding assault would make that moment greater still. Ideally I'd like to say to him, dear sir, I do not imagine you have many friends, and I think it's about time I told you why. You strike me as being, a donkey hole and I worry you are a psychopath. I feel obligated to inform you that you might be able to increase your popularity by caring about other people, and actually being loving. In the mean time, I hope you get three Christmas ghosts visit you for Christmas, you peace of very smelly digested food

It was a Christmas time a few years ago when I started doubting if National Express was a good company as I had always thought it was. The employer collecting tickets (supposed to be his job but was more less just stressing) and driver at Stratford was literally shouting at people standing outside trying to get in. He was not able to instruct us, or create any sort of queue system. Extremely stressful situation.

This Wednesday, after a few years, me and my husband used National Express bus from Stanstead airport to Stratford again. Big mistake. And I was shocked again: 1/ driver didn`t even check our tickets or the bus and stopped me that the bus was full - in a very rude style!!! We had pre-booked tickets for the bus so thought this might interest him. I knew it wasn`t anything I did as I didn`t have a chance to say a word. The driver managed to speak to all of us at the beginning about a possible rubbish we might leave behind. It was in such a style that I thought we were in a war zone. I can`t even say a classroom because he was like from an army. I even told him to calm down. Honestly, do something about it:

train your staff to behave and respect your customers,

train them to be able to manage stress and crowds and

most importantly how to talk to your customers.

The level is very low at the moment!!!