sebastianeQ7513EO
Jan 2023
We got the 2-day bus pass for my family, including my 3 kids. Overall the bus was nice, the routes were fine and the narration was useful. But there are so many issues with the tours and their service, and we had terrible experiences with their employees.
The biggest issue we had was on our second day. A family went into the bus before us from a bus stop, but they didn't have the proper ticket so the bus driver wanted them to get off to fix things. For some reason the family didn't understand this or tried to get down through the back door, which wasn't available. The bus driver, instead of just clearly telling us not to get into the bus until that other family had gotten off, closed down the bus doors in our faces while we were still getting on board. My two daughters got trapped on the doors; one of them was able to get off, but my 5-year old got her boot stuck on the door and was left hanging there for a while, with the doors pressing on her. The driver did not open the doors, went to call the other family, and only after a while came to manually reopen the door, after we had been struggling with the door to manually open it to help our terrified daughter off of it. Once we got in, the driver didn't even apologize, just looked at us sourly. There were 2 more employees on the bus stop, nobody did anything about it other than look. My daughters were physically and mentally hurt, and 3 employees there did nothing about it at all, when it had been all their faults and with an issue that had nothing to do with us at all. This is the definition of terrible employees and awful service. Unfortunately, this means that we will never ride in a Big Bus again, and we will certainly not recommend them to anyone else.
Besides this big issue, there were a lot of smaller issues that reflected how poor their service was:
- To get in the bus, you had to exchange your QR codes bought online, even if they were printed, into tickets printed by employees on the bus stops with their special machines. But the employees on the bus stops hardly ever checked that people had their printed tickets before getting into the bus, which is why the family before us had to get off. In many bus stops, there were no employees, so there was no way to get the ticket. We saw one other person who was not allowed to board because they had they QR code on their phone and no printed ticket, and there was no employee to turn it into a printed ticket (and apparently drivers don't do that either).
- Especially near the end of the day, bus stops start filling up and dozens of buses can pass by without you being able to get on, which can mean hours waiting, or maybe just getting left there if there are no more buses coming.
- They have 2 routes, and only some stops are for both routes. Most buses have small signs that make it really hard to figure out which route the bus is in (and in our case, after waiting for some time, the bus arrived with the proper sign and when we tried to get on, it had the wrong sign on it and was for the other route). On the stops with 2 routes, the employees kinda sorta make two lines, very vague, one for each route. In our case people started cutting in to get on the route for which we were in line, and we approached the employees to ask them to tell them to get in line, they started arguing about we staying in our line and didn't even try to help or understand the issue. They were rude, didn't help, and the other people ended up cutting in the line, and they didn't care at all.
- The employees that are on some stops are not helpful in telling you when the bus is coming, or how long you have to wait. In our case, they were rude about it, saying things like "I don't own the bus", which makes no sense. There is an app that is supposed to tell you when the bus is coming, but half of its information is not available, when you click on a bus it does not tell you how long till it gets to yur stop, and at least in one case the stop info on the app was telling us the next bus was 30 minutes away, and it got there in 10 minutes, so you can't even trust that information. They have a good idea somewhere in there, but between the app issues and the unhelpfulness of the employees, it doesn't work well.
- One of their draws is a recorded narration that goes with the tour. They provide you with earphones for this, but only sometimes and on some stops; we were lucky to get ours. On one of our trips, the narration was broken the whole time so we missed the whole narration tour for that route. And no employees said anything about it.
Overall, we had a decent experience on day 1, and a terrible experience on day 2, when we used it the most. It soured our whole trip.