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It's possible, but IME, people really do not exaggerate when they say it's bad. It's bad. I don't consider myself a super pampered traveler - I fly budget airlines, I take overnight layovers, I've slept in Amtrak coach - but Greyhound (which, AFAIK, is pretty much the main long-distance bus service in the US, outside of a few regional lines) is the bottom of the barrel. There are some fine Greyhound routes, I'd say on average they'll usually work as expected and get you to your destination. They're often even comfortable. But they fail often and when they do, they fail HARD. The most annoying normal, happy-path thing for long-distance travel on Greyhounds is the periodic stops for driver changes. They happen without warning - it doesn't appear as a layover when booking, it seems like a normal stop right up until you get to it, when all of a sudden everyone is asked to get off the bus for an hour or so. You have to decide at the start what stuff you want to take, because you won't be let back on the bus in that hour. During that hour, you'll wait in the bus station, which is pretty much always a run-down, filthy building in an awful part of town. There might be a store if you're lucky; there will at least be a vending machine and a (nasty) bathroom. I don't know if they do these stops overnight, but I have had them happen pretty late when I was trying to sleep. And yeah, that's just a bit of an annoyance - under normal operation. If something goes wrong? That's the really great part - Greyhound has effectively zero customer support. As far as I can tell (or as far as they make it seem), no customer-facing employee actually has the power to do anything, or any special visibility into the system. The agent in the station, if there is one, will refuse pretty much any question and just tell you to call the customer support number. Once, at one of those driver-change stops, the new driver just... didn't show up? The station agent refused to talk to anyone beyond periodic updates every few hours (which were little more than "the driver might be here by X time", as X kept increasing) and yelled at people to call the customer support line, who also seemed to have zero idea what was going on - and of course, you guessed it - told us to talk to the station agent. It's kind of beautiful, in a Kafkaesque, Catch-22 kind of way, if you ignore all the human suffering it inflicts upon its riders, who are generally the poorest people in society. A new driver did eventually show, after ten hours of overnight waiting for what should have been a one-hour stop. Obviously, everyone missed their connections, but thankfully at the next major station, the agent helped us out- just kidding, she told all of us to call the customer service number. (I'm still mind-boggled by what the actual purpose is of a station agent if not to rebook people.) Based on some of the interactions we had, I suspect the customer service agent just sees the exact same "change your ticket" UI you do from the booking website. And obviously, as far as I know, nobody got any sort of voucher or refund; nobody was put up in a hotel. A different time, I had my luggage go missing from the cargo area from under the bus. The driver told me it might have mistakenly been offloaded at an earlier station (cool. thanks.) and told me to talk to the agent inside. You can probably guess what the agent told me to do. And there's all the issues the others mentioned - mainly the thing with them closing their actual station buildings and just picking up and dropping people off on the roadside or at random gas stations. I didn't mean for this post to be this long, but it truly kind of depresses and amazes me how bad of a system it is. It is falling apart at almost all levels. People talk badly about Amtrak, but as mentioned elsewhere, they'll at least put you in a hotel if you miss a major connection. Budget airlines are uncomfortable but at least have actual gate agents, and even the worst airport is vastly cleaner and more comfortable your average Greyhound building. There are some redeeming factors. The buses themselves are usually comfortable and decently clean, and most if not all have power outlets, although often not at every seat. The "weird/gross passenger sitting next to you" thing is exaggerated, though I have had one bad one. The Wi-Fi exists but is generally completely unusable, but if you have a hotspot, it'll generally work pretty well since you'll be on major highways the whole time. But the punchline to it all? It's not even that much cheaper. It's, like, maybe half the price of an airplane ticket. |
For the route I take it's around $30 for the plane, and $70 for the bus. The bus takes around 8 hours, the plane takes around an hour and a half but then you have to factor in extra time at the terminal.