Megabus is a Megabust

Megabus sucks.

One of the luxuries of living on the East Coast is that you can use public transportation to get anywhere fairly easily. Or so I thought.

Madison Lane and I made last-minute plans to go to D.C. for the presidential inauguration weekend festivities. We purchased Megabus tickets for a 6:45 bus Saturday morning. Arriving at the bus stop early, we took a place in line and waited. And waited. And waited. And waited. Until 7:15. In 14° weather.

No worries. We didn’t let the cold weather get us down. We didn’t let the late bus get us down. When the bus finally did arrive, we climbed on, happy that in five short hours we’d be joining the masses for a historic weekend.

What did get us down? The fact that our bus didn’t have heat. When the bus still hadn’t heated up by the time we’d gotten to New Jersey, we knew there was a problem. The driver was told to stop at a gas station and wait for a new bus. Awesome. Luckily, the bus arrived within minutes. We unpacked the first bus, repacked the second and we were on our way.

Madison Lane and I had a blast in D.C. We got to visit with friends, sightsee and witness history-in-the-making. We had so much fun that we likely would have forgotten our Megabus troubles had they not caused a bigger fiasco when we attempted to head home.

When I arrived at the bus station to find a Martin Luther King, Jr. Day parade instead of my 12:15 p.m. bus, I knew I was in trouble. I wandered around trying to find someone that looked like they would know where the bus stop had moved. Surely it was only a couple blocks away – I just needed to know what direction.

How very wrong I was. Finally, a fellow passenger, not a Megabus employee or Megabus signage, informed me that the stop had moved (without notification) several metro stops away. I called Madison Lane to notify her of the bus stop change and we decided to cab it over in hopes that we could still make the bus. I jumped in her cab as it rounded the corner, gave the cab driver directions and told him to step on it. He laughed instead. Apparently, the new bus stop was too far away and we’d pay a lot of money to get to a bus we’d surely miss.

He dropped us off at the nearest metro stop and I prepared to give Megabus a piece of my mind. Standing amongst our luggage in the middle of the sidewalk, I angrily called Megabus. Two hours later, after several phone calls to several different numbers and a lot of yelling, we were booked on a 9 p.m. bus, which arrived in New York at 2 a.m. I was NOT a happy camper. Fortunately, Madison Lane and I did make the 9 p.m. bus. The bus was dirty and the bathroom wasn’t usable, but we did manage to make it home a little before 2.

I called Megabus customer service as soon as I got into the office the next morning. They were almost as unhelpful as the people I spoke to the day before. They said they’d have their supervisor call me when I expressed I was unsatisfied with their unsympathetic response. Of course, he didn’t call and when I called him, he’d conveniently left for the day.

I tried again the next day and finally got through to someone who was willing to compensate me for the huge inconvenience Megabus had caused. I received a refund for the D.C. to New York nightmare, but was given a free one-way ticket for the New York to D.C. ordeal, meaning I was going to be forced to use Megabus again.

So when I made plans to visit John Marshall this weekend, I called Megabus to use my free ticket. I was booked on a 7:15 bus to D.C. yesterday evening. It arrived around 8:15, 30 minutes after I was beginning to think my toes had frozen to the inside of my shoes. We stopped twice for long periods of time without any explanation. The kids behind me talked, whined and made constant noise for almost the entire trip. The little boy kept jostling my seat and sticking his foot next to me. I was close to FREAKING OUT.

Needles to say, I won’t be calling Megabus to complain about my most recent experience. I don’t want free tickets that will force me to use their services again. I’ll be using BoltBus from now on and I recommend that you do, too.

Megabus sucks.