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Avoid NationalExpress

Me, my wife and out 10-month old boy were going from London Victoria courch station to Luton Airport and the journey was disrupted by traffic congestion on 19/04/2024 evening. This caused me and my family an overall delay of95 minutes to Luton Airport. According to NationalExpress clock, it was 88 minutes only. Anyhow, it was the last plane to Amsterdam that day and I had to rebook a flight for the 3 of us and a hotel. It cost me around 400€ and NationalExpress says that I should have put 3 hours between the arrival time into the airport and the flight departure time instead of 2,5 hours. Who goes to the airport for an EasyJet flight without check-in luggage before 3 hours? If I had done so, we would have missed the flight anyways, but NationalExpress do not listen to you. They found a reason not to reimburse and they hide behind it.

This is not the worst thing yet. They also say that I should have contacted to the Control Centre which would have then advised me on the most appropriate action to take or arrange for alternative means of transportation to your ticketed destination. However, I did called them around the 60th minutes of the delay and they advised me to call EasyJet maybe they can keep the gate open for us. Even we called them, they assume we did not called them all.

I would never ever use it again. I wish I have not used them before.

Posted by
7052 posts

You can hardly blame for National Express for congestion. That can happen in large cities, and I'm not sure e.g. Flixbus would have handled the congestion better.

You could also have taken the Eurostar to Amsterdam and avoided having to go to Luton.

Posted by
8134 posts

There could not be a larger message on the National Express website to allow 3 hours. You chose to ignore it. You had a 2 hour check in time. You chose to give yourself only half an hour beyond that.

You could also have gone on the train- which would have been faster, as well as avoiding traffic congestion.

Posted by
2 posts

88 minutes. They got an 88-minute delay, and the total trip was 199 minutes, for only a 55km distance. I did not mean that other companies would have handled it better, and your suggestion to take the train now is not solving the problem :)
I showed an alternative route to the driver which would save around 50 minutes but he was not interested.
What makes you believe that if I had taken 30 30-minute earlier bus, it would be okay?
Nationalexpress apologized for the delay not less than 5 times in their reply, but people here tries to discredit it. Go go go your comments makes lots of sense :)

Posted by
1027 posts

I've already needed to remove some posts. To avoid the issues noted in guideline #9, I'm going to close this thread here.