Greyhound leaves passengers on bus stranded for 8 hours, delivers them to final destination 12 hours behind schedule
Late Monday evening, 20 or so passengers left Boston on a Greyhound bus, headed to Montreal, a trip that would take them roughly seven and a half hours. Or so they thought. As WCAX Channel 3 reports, when they arrived in the town of White River Junction, Vermont at 2 a.m., their driver (whose shift had ended) stopped the bus and got off. They then waited, on the bus, eight hours before another driver arrived to resume the trip at 10 a.m.
Unfortunately, the Canada-bound passengers’ grief did not end there. When they stopped at Burlington International Airport in Vermont, around noon, they were presented with yet another delay: no driver was available to take them up to Montreal and they would have to wait another three hours.
The customers were understandably frustrated. It seems Greyhound’s response was severely lacking. Calls to their customer service line offered no assistance, just music. The Greyhound counter at the airport had a sign suggesting an employee would be back in 30 minutes, yet it took hours for someone to actually show. Nerves frayed to the point that Greyhound employee Carol Anderson even said, on camera, "Here's the deal, if anyone has anymore issues I can make it so no one can get on the bus. I’m doing all I can to make sure you get on the 3:30 bus." Police were even called to the scene, though WCAX notes that “calmed things down quickly.”
At long last, a Greyhound bus arrived at the airport, and passengers got on board. They finally arrived in Montreal at 6 p.m. Tuesday, “nearly 12 hours after its scheduled arrival.” While stuck in Vermont, the passengers expressed their frustration with Greyound. One student who missed an exam because of the delays said that they were never informed during the initial, eight-hour delay what was going on. Another passenger expressed shock that a “reputable company” would have messed up like this.
Greyhound spoke with WCAX, and said their computer system went down and thus weren’t able to “track and schedule drivers.” They also noted that this was the only route impacted by the outage.
This isn’t the first time that Greyhound passengers have been subjected to lengthy delays. In July 2013, a Greyhound bus drivingfrom Durham, North Carolina to New York broke down twice, leaving its riders stranded for more than 24 hours. In November 2011, a Greyhound driver abandoned her bus 100 miles from their final destination of St. Louis, and passengers waited 10 hours to finally get there.
More info: WCAX
