I do think the same arguments regarding work services and those getting to work on earlier morning buses is brought up evey year. GNE/Arriva & Stagecoach (I assume with the latter) are running to Saturday timetable on the non-bank holiday days between Christmas & New Year; always been this way. However workers do miss out as Saturday buses start a lot later on all routes, obviously the number of people off mean some services can't run, but maybe it's about time Nexus/DCC and other local authorities actually got involved especially to places of key employment; Team Valley & Doxford International etc. worth mentioning thought that Arriva ran to normal timetable for a Tuesday on Christmas Eve as opposed to the Saturday timetable offering from GNE with both running off at 6-8.
With regards to weekly tickets, I can see both sides. Customers know inadvance or should know inadvance what services are running and to what times. So there's no excuses from passengers claiming not to know the timetables. However if you buy a weekly ticket each week (like I do) it costs me £23.50/£24.00 for red & turquoise and if you buy week tickets like I got into a situation which meant mine expired each Thursday, I would have to buy a week pass on Thursday 19th, for it to expire on Wednesday 25th Decmeber, it still works out cheaper than 6x£6.10 for the day ticket each day. And if I bought it a day later it'd be 1 day of no buses and 1 with a very limited service. It's not good for the customer, maybe some nice Christmas deals from the operators (slightly reduced weekly/monthly tickets maybe?) might a gesture of good will it been Christmas and all that not to mention paying for Christmas is hard enough without feeling like the bus company have ripped you off!
I do think GNE is good company and offer some great value fares that can't really be complained about, but there is some things which can get peoples backs up; without going off topic and rambling too much, the peak time fares for my cousin's daughter, she's 11, and each morning is getting the bus to school costing £1.35 each way as she going during the peak times when really £1.80 should do her there and back, but no it's costing £2.70, 90p more each day quickly mounts up.
I do think GNE are very good in bad weather a few weeks backs I recall them staying online a little later maybe? Or providing extra information in the floods wasn't it? Which was very good. The snow updates earlier this year were very good. They were online til 10pm in most cases of extremely bad snow/ice which is very reassuring, if they were to launch an app similar to arrivas live tracking map that would also be excellent as I personally love arrivas app it's very handy for passengers. Something which I will be using for sure.
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RE: Go North East - Latest