Big Green Shambles

Dear Big Green Coach,

Before arranging our travel to and from Global Gathering I checked out all the options available: car share, National Express coach, rail and finally Big Green Coach. At the time, Big Green Coach was going to cost a little more than going by train on an advance ticket, but we thought the ease of going straight to the festival combined with the atmosphere we expected on the coach would make it worthwhile. I am sure you can appreciate just how disappointed we were when our coach was cancelled just 9 days before the event.

At this point I looked again for alternative travel. The only option we could see was to book a train to the event which would cost over £140 each. There was no way we could have afforded that amount at such short notice, and we had to consider selling our festival tickets for a loss and cancelling the whole weekend. Eventually a family member in Lincolnshire suggested an alternative which, despite being fairly complicated, was just about affordable.

We got a train from Norwich to Nottingham at 5.50am on Friday morning, the only train to get us to Nottingham in time for the Big Green departure time of 11.45am. The plan was to have breakfast in Nottingham, catch the coach and head to the festival. This would have been a long and tiring day, but worth it by the time we got to the festival. On the Sunday we planned to get the coach back to Nottingham, where my relative was able to pick us up at our expected arrival time of around 1.30, stay at theirs for the night and travel back to Norwich on Monday morning.

Unfortunately when we got to the pick-up point in Nottingham none of the staff had heard of Big Green Coach. After several attempts at calling your customer service number we finally got through to someone who said the coach was expected to arrive at around 12.15 after being stuck in heavy traffic. By 12.30 when the coach had still not arrived we called again, and again, and again. The staff had no more information on the location of the coach or what time we could expect to be picked up. At 1.15 I called again and was told the coach was almost there, having been delayed again by needing to stop for a seriously ill passenger.

We eventually left Nottingham bus station at 1.45pm, 2 hours after our departure time. We asked other passengers about why the coach was late and told them what Big Green staff had told us. They were shocked as there had been no heavy traffic on the way, and no seriously (or mildly) ill passengers! I was shocked that your staff felt the need to lie to us at any point. The reasons for the coach being late included an hour waiting at Leeds, which no-one could explain, combined with multiple wrong-turns by the driver. From Nottingham to the festival there were several mishaps by the driver, including wrong turns, missing exits on roundabouts and leaving passengers behind at stops. Needless to say, with some passengers having been on the bus since 9.30am and us having been travelling since 5.30am there wasn’t much of a festival atmosphere. We got to the festival at 5.30pm, a full 3 hours after we were expected to, and enjoyed the festival whilst trying not to think about what Sunday’s return journey would hold for us.

On Sunday our coach was set to depart at 10.30am. It was a bit of a struggle getting all packed up and getting to the pick-up point, but we arrived 15 minutes early as directed on the tickets. On arrival we were told the coaches were all running late, and they had no idea when they would be leaving. Once again, we waited. Finally at 11.30 we boarded a coach, a little dubious about the driver’s lack of knowledge about the stops he was supposed to go to or how he was supposed to get there. Because we arrived so late at Nottingham we had to pay for a train to my family’s house that evening.

In short, we went from a £45 pp coach trip to a £60+ pp coach/train trip plus extra for food and drink whilst waiting around, childcare on Thursday and Monday to cover the extra travelling time and inconvenience for us and our families. We are sorely disappointed with the whole Big Green Coach experience, will never use the company again, and will warn others against the debacle where possible.

I hope for your sake you employ someone with organisational and customer service skills if you want your company to succeed in future.

Sincerely

Disgruntled Ali Sprout