Learn To Save Your Money

Over this past weekend I took a weekend trip to NYC to visit my aunt. Instead of driving, I decided to take the Megabus bus to NYC for several reasons. I have used Megabus before and have been very pleased in the past. Since I was traveling by myself it did not make sense to spend money to drive as I would have to pay for tolls, gas, and maybe even some crazy rates for parking.  

Megabus charged $18 each way for taking an early Saturday morning bus and leaving NYC on Sunday evening. As always these buses are clean as well as their drivers usually make it up to NYC and back from NYC faster than it would be if I drove the speed limit. In order to make reservations, one has to visit Megabus’ web site (http://www.megabus.com) and reservations can only be made with a credit or debit card. The web site itself is fairly easy to use. 

My Sunday evening bus was to leave NYC at 6:10 pm, but due to some reason the bus was running late. The representative at the bus stop mentioned that the bus would be there within an hour, but when it came near 7:10 pm the representative mentioned that bus won’t get there for another hour. At this point many passengers waiting in line to board the bus were annoyed. irrated, and losing their pateince. In the mean time there was a 7:45 pm bus which was to leave NYC, but this was supposedly full, as the passengers for this bus were already waiting in their designated line. Out of frustration many passengers in my line asked if we could get first priority to this bus, rather than waiting longer for our original bus. EVentually the reperesentatives and the bus driver agreed to let us board the bus and they were accepting others from the following bus’ line to board this bus if there were extra seats. We did not leave the bus stop till 8:00 pm. 

I was somewhat displeased with this experience since in my past experiences with Megabus, I have not encountered such a long delay. Also the representatives on site can’t help to give a discount or a credit even when the bus was late due to the company’s fault rather than traffic or such other issue. Each repersentative told me to call a toll free number, where I would speak to another representative who told me to call back during the weekdays to speak to a supervisor. I tried to speak with a supervisor this morning, but as usual I was just sent to a generic voicemail system, where I did leave a message. The customer service for the reservations department is useless as they are not helpful at all. I got fed up and then called the credit card company for the card I used to purchase my tickets. Luckilly American Express has great customer service and within a quick 5 min call, a representative was able to issue a credit for my return trip fare. WorldPay, the company who processes Megabus’ credit card transactions has some agreement where AmEx directly resolves disputes with them and AmEx will credit a customer’s account right away rather than having the customer to wait for a charge dispute case to take place. In the end I recieved a credit for my return trip and did not have to deal with trying to contact Megabus’ lousy customer service center. The time to call my credit card company was incredibly less than having to deal with Megabus’ customer service. 

Image Credit: Joshua Feinberg