(25 Jul 2017, 9:36 am)RBZ 5459 wrote There was an official press release on the C&NL Stagecoach page, but nothing official from the regions the open topper is/has been going to so far. It has featured heavily on social media with Transport for Greater Manchester and today with Travel Merseyside and Merseyside Better By Bus Campaign, much of the material linking to social media.
It was never planned to be a huge media push (papers etc), an on the fly push to promote with the passing punters. Lots of #hashtags and social media push in the end which has worked pretty well so far. The open topper was in and out of the Piccadilly all day so turned a few heads anyway! There is a Stagecoach promotional team on board and were out in Manchester between runs yesterday too, giving out freebies and whatnot.
In fairness the promo-tour almost didn't happen. It has been a push to get the open-toppers ready, especially in time for the start of the school holidays considering they were suppose to be here in April. In addition, Wright managed to send them not fully complete, there was also an untoward certification issues (which in the end deemed the Lothian Gemini 3 OTs in the red too), plus Hannover have been (and still) completing NSA installations which have caused a headache in themselves due to screen sizes being spec-d wrongly somewhere along the line.
Good feedback from Manchester anyway, a local team push pre-visit from regions would have been the icing on the cake though I agree.
I'm not on (anti-) social media, but from what I can gather it only got mentioned on TFGM's twitter feed on the day itself, and certainly not on their website. In fact. I think they simply "retweet" whatever other organisations post. This would obviously have come from Stagecoach Manchester, and didn't give any details of where the bus would be. Ironically, the only reference to service 203 was a warning to customers in general that it was running 20-25 minutes late, along with many other services in the Stockport area. From those in the know reporting afterwards, the suggestion is that 13802 managed to escape these delays. Normally, there would be options for a 203 to recover time by missing part of the route, but as the Roadworks are slap bang in the town centre and the general traffic diversions would clog up all surrounding roads - especially the logical escape route (A6 towards Manchester).
RE: North West Bus Operations