(05 Aug 2022, 12:28 am)stagecoachbusdepot wrote See I think this is where it goes wrong. These things are lovely and I am sure some people notice/care (and I'd wager a lot more don't) however they come at a premium. We have services that apparently make too little money to turn a profit yet the company tries to match "luxury" standards, and turn a profit, and try not to discourage people with higher fares, so can't afford decent wages/conditions, so can't recruit/retain staff, so fundamentally fail as a reliable operator. It isn't rocket science. The more money spent on the deluxe options on the vehicle, or the umpteenth paint job, increases the costs to run the service and reduces ability to respond to challenges (whether fare offers, wage bills etc).
Trying to promote the standard A to B service bus as being "as posh as your car" is nonsense - you can have the poshest of seats and mood lighting and broken USB chargers... but if a load of chavs get on and make the journey miserable, or the bus is rammed because they want them full to the rafters to maximise profit to pay for said luxuries, or if you've visibly aged waiting for the bus to even turn up as they are now so infrequent and unreliable...this "car replica" suddenly isn't so convincing.
I'm hopeful we will see a clear change in direction from the new MD (with a hopefully new back office team, getting rid of the rot that have presided over the ever spiralling decline of the company and importantly it's reputation in the local communities over the last 12-18 months). The model MG has pursued of throwing money, paint and ridiculously OTT marketing (overpromising and woefully under delivering - #betterthannever #gamechanging #fitforthefuture - ok the last one may not have been a #) very clearly doesn't work given services being slashed include those which are/were "posh". I think this is where the likes of Stagecoach get it right in terms of a pretty basic offering, which - at least outside looking in over the last however many decades - delivers a much more stable network, presumably at least partly becuase they ensure their expenditure doesnt outstrip what they can hope to bring in through revenue, so they don't have to cut and rejig services every few months. To be fair to the current team, the latter point on instability of the network has been a feature of Northern for decades though and does appear to be a deliberate strategy - if such a thing is possible!?
There's been a lot of talk of it before and this is not just GNE, but isnt the issue here that all of the traditional local mini/midi services were withdrawn in favour of turn up and go (now turn up and we might too eventually) high frequency routs for the convenience of marketing rather than customers? So now, the services that would have run direct along trunk routes are having to divert into places to maintain "a service" (which may or may not go somewhere useful for that particular community, but that's not important, box ticked that there is " a service").
Entirely agree with all of this - its focusing on the day job of getting passengers from A to B which at the moment they are failing at
You can compete with the car on cost (at the moment) but not much else - they can work on that.
Again on the marketing and the strategy from MG - potentially a goer in the 'olden' days but it just doesn't work inthe current timeframe
You can read between the lines from the stuff you see on social media (and taken with a pinch of salt) but there's clearly a 'them and us' mentality within GNE in terms of leaders vs drivers and alarmingly leaders vs passengers. It's not a happy camp and from some of the reactions/engagements with employees on here - you can certainly see why.