JFC Travel Blog

I have to say that overall I’m not too happy with the first few months of the National Express East Coast franchise. In fact, the only good thing I can say about them is that gner.co.uk redirects to their website so I don’t have to type the ridiculously long nationalexpresseastcoast.com if I’m on a computer where it’s not bookmarked. I suspect the people at the NXEC commuter blog are wishing for a return of GNER, their blog was originally set up to criticise GNER and they were happy that they lost their franchise. Perhaps now they can admit that GNER wasn’t all that bad really So far I’ve noticed the following on my travels with NXEC…

• Less reliability, I’ve already made 3 delay claims for compensation since the new franchise started.
• No loyalty scheme - although it was nice that they honoured GNERtime until its expiry, there’s no sign of an NXECtime or any other loyalty scheme to replace the GNER scheme. In fact they seem to prefer rewarding people who choose to fly with free tickets rather than their regular travellers.
• Fare rises - the price of flexible tickets go up yet again. Train travel is cheap for those who book restrictive tickets but for me the main benefit of the train is flexibility. With the increasing delays and lack of a loyalty scheme it makes the fares look even less value for money.
• Restaurant - my favourite part of travelling on the east coast route is the on-board restaurant. However, a number of trains I’ve been on that are supposed to be running a restaurant have not been running for various reasons (staff shortages, the ingredients are not on board and the oven wasn’t working are reasons that I’ve been given). These things happen, but it seems more frequent with NXEC.
• Total lack of style - we lose the stylish livery of GNER and the attention to detail they had when designing the covers for the on board menus. In it’s place we get ugly grey trains and menus that look like they come from a transport caff. The covers look so cheap but when you open the menu you realise it’s anything but.

So there’s the things I think they do worse than GNER, can anyone think of anything that they do better?

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 1st, 2008 at 2:23 pm and is filed under Rail, GNER. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.