National express > Reviews > Take the National Express when...

Author's product rating:   

Quality of Rooms	Average
Customer service	bad
Frequency of bus / buses	Frequent
Value for money	Good
Reliability	Good

Advantages:	Cost, Gets you where you need to get to, easy to book
Disadvantages:	smell, weird staff and coach drivers, seating space

Recommend to potential buyers:

no

Full review

So the lyrics go...

"Take the National Express, when your life's in a mess, it will make you smillleee"

Based on my experience, the last thing i do when taking the national express coach journeys is smile. I think the words that comes to mind are cry, scream, wail, shout, stress, you get the idea.

What is the National Express i hear you cry?!

Well, the national express is a coach company based in Britain. They run many a service from many coach stations across the country. Anywhere you wanna go, is pretty much catered for. Visiting relatives from Birmingham to Devon? Theres a coach. Going up to Leeds music festival from Nottingham? Theres a coach. Travelling back to university from home? Theres a coach.

The coachs run 24 hours a day. That is to say, you could travel to your destination early in the morning, mid day, late afternoon, evening and throughout the night.

How do i book?

You can book by ringing the national express number or by visiting www.nationalexpress.co.uk. This website is relatively easy to navigate. You can simply chose your departing destination from a drop down menu and click on the destination you wish to go to. You specify the dates and then a list of coaches for that day is shown with specific times and wether they are any coach changes to be made, along with wether a toilet is on board etc. You can then click on your preferred coach and then go on to pay. Payment can be accepted using credit and debit cards, visa, switch etc.

There are a variety of ways to get tickets. Tickets can be sent to your home address. However two other ways are an e ticket and a text ticket.

The e ticket is simple a page which you print off using your computer, you can use this to show to the driver of your coach that you bought a ticket. Or theres a service which a code is sent to your phone and you show presumably the text message to your coach driver as you board. I have not tried this method.

I have used the service where tickets are sent to your house. They arrived within 2 days and in plenty of time for my coach. However there were so many tickets i got confused. They arent clear enough. You get a confirmation ticket, an outgoing ticket and a returning ticket ( if you order a two way journey) you also get a piece of card which looks like a ticket but just has your name and other details on. On one occasion when boarding a coach the women in front of me had bought the wrong bits of paper with her, the ones with her confirmation order on and her name, instead of the actual ticket. Who can blame her, they look nearly identical. And the coach driver wouldnt let her on. My advice...if you order paper tickets to be sent to you take EVERYTHING they send when you board the coach.

Nowadays i tend to print off an e ticket. This is easy and quick and it means you dont have to worry about the post not arriving. The e tickets work well. Just show the printed page to your driver.

Now onto the journeys...

I have taken a number of journeys with national express and will review some here.

......An overnight long distance trip.....

This was a trip in 2004 from London Victoria coach station to Leeds Coach station. Reason for trip was to get to Leeds Music Festical, which by the way awesome! Anyways, i digress. The coach departed around 11pm and we arrived at leeds around 3am. When departing it was on time. The coach driver helped us put our luggage in the undercarriage compartment. We then nabbed the back seats as we were first on. Bad choice as it was right by the toilet, which smelled to high heaven. My advice, is given a choice do not seat near the toilet. The coach made various stop offs at other coach stations on the way up to leeds through the night. There are curtains to pull across the windows when needing sleep and the lights were dimmed and the coach was peaceful. Hard to sleep on though, but then it is a coach.

......Trips to and from University......

As a uni student i get the coach often at end of each term to get home. This is where my hatred for coach journeys started. Generally they are on time and arrive on time. There has only been one occasion where the coach was 40 minutes late. There was no apology for this lateness.
The thing i have noticed, and maybe its just the drivers who work on the areas i travel to, but, they are rude, obnoxious, unhelpful "jokers" who clearly done really care about your comfort. I shall give you an example, When boarding a coach i had a huge suitcase, it was insanely heavy, not just with clothes and shoes, but with uni text books as i was going home for christmas and took all my uni notes and folders and books to revise. I stupidly thought that the staff on the coach would help the passengers put any luggage in the compartment underneath. Did they? No. They opened up the underpart which is divided into smaller compartments labelled with destinations. The idea that you put your luggage in the compartment labelled with the place you are going to so the luggage is organised. I struggled to heave my suitcase into this space and in the end asked the staff to help me, which they did, but only after me asking and them initally ignoring me. Great. Since then i have noticed they never help unless you make a point out of it. Not so helpful for people travelling with lots of luggage.

Apart from the hassle of trying to get your large luggage items sorted out you then have the hassle of the mass of people who push and shove to get on the coach first. There is rarely an orderly queue, surprising of the british. People want to get on that coach as fast as possible in order to get the good seats, you cant blame them though, as you are not given a specified seat and sit where you like. The booking system insures there will always be seats for every passenger. It just means you might draw the short straw of sitting next to someone undesirable which i shall discuss shortly. Back to the queuing, or lack of it! Yes i know its not the companys fault that people push and shove, but if you are a mild mannered police person then you tend to let people push infront. It definetly toughens you up.

So after the luggage, and trying to fight your way in some sort of queue you give your ticket to the driver, hoping youve brought the right one. So youre standing there with your bag and possibly your uni lap top when the driver looks at it and says

"whats that"

and you say

"my lap top"

and he says

"cant take that on love"

and you say

"huh?! why not?"

and he, pointing to his heart says

"its electrical, interfers with my pacemaker"

and you go

"are you joking?""

and he says

"no"

yes this actually happened to me. I was so stressed what with exams and the stress of coaches and other life events that i just gave up and said oh right, ill get my suitcase then, walked off to get it and then he lauaghed and said

"i was joking"

Great. Really funny. Well actually i guess it is funny and kinda embarrassing that i actually fell for it but then im pretty guillable anyways. But thats not the issue. What is the issue is that your stressed and just wanna get a seat and then you end up with a sarcastic fat driver who thinks its amusing to make fun of his passengers. I boarded that coach with embarrassment looking around at the ipods and mobile phones people had, all electrical yet hardly gonna set of a pacemaker. Other examples of rudeness include pretending your ticket isnt valid, then saying it is etc etc. Hardly professional.

ok so what are the journeys like? Generally i get on, put my ipod on and read or just look out the window. They tend to go pretty smoothly. Although once we stopped on the side of a motorway for no apparently reason and with no explanation. 20 minutes later we drove off. The main problem comes with other passengers. You ethier end up sitting behind some idiot who decided to recline his seat so you are squashed. Or you get some perve sitting next to you, or someone fat who takes up half your seat too. Occasionaly someone nice will sit next to you and leave you alone or strike up a pleasant chat.

So. conclusion!

I stil have top use national express and it is pretty cheap. its also good because often you never have to change coaches, unlike trains, you just get on the coach and chill out. or try to anyways.
Its relatively cheap, you can get family passes, student discounts with a £10 card.

Bad points, obnoxious horrible drivers, smelly coaches, annoying weird people