We rode Greyhound from Toronto, Ontario to NYC the long weekend of May. The lineups at the Port authority bus terminal were unbelievable, 500 people in front of us even though we were one hour ahead of departure time. We were to board a 8:15 PM bus but guess what we had to board a 9:15 bus. Which transportation mode forces you to board one hour late?
Thankfully i had a third row seat. The seat design is weird wherein your head and the shoulders cannot rest properly and consequence is a bad sleep. BTW, don't even think of using washrooms, no hand sanitizer, no water, you could not even flush. The driver was courteous, gave updates whenever he could. The US customs was absolutely super slow to process the buses. They took 3 hours to process the clearance of allowing the bus to go forward.
The return trip was relatively more smooth, the Canadian customs clearance was all of 30 minutes. The seats were not designed well either, hard to sleep. Unfortunately our seating was towards the lower middle ground of the bus and the washroom smell was present all through the trip. The driver was very courteous again, gave regular updates.
My advice for travelling to people on Greyhound is to avoid long distance trips and if you have no other choice, look for seating in the first 7-8 rows only.
The online ticket booking is very funny, one could see very few time slots in the night but over the phone many other bus timings were available. How can the ticketing systems were not integrated properly?
Online booking was on average $50 cheaper than over the phone. The online ticket was 7 pages long. Every time a new driver showed up at different stops like Buffalo, Syracuse, you are required to show off your ticket and they will tear that portion of the travel ticket. This is very kiddish and weird way of doing business.
0 comments