Starling Travel

December 17, 2009

The Future of Bus Travel Has Arrived?

Filed under: Travel — Laura Moncur @ 10:00 am

Greyhound Future of Bus Travel: click to see full sizeI saw this advertisement for Greyhound yesterday and it sounded like traveling on a bus might be better than it used to be.

It reads:

The future of bus travel has arrived. Well ahead of schedule.

Introducing the brand-new, redesigned Greyhound bus. Learn more about the specific amenities our newly redesigned motorcoach has to offer.

New Amenities: Wi-Fi, outlets, legroom, safety and eco-friendly.

Being able to be online while traveling might make riding the bus better than flying or driving it myself, so I thought I would check the prices.

To ride from Salt Lake City to Las Vegas, it would cost me $107 and take me 8 hours (which is three hours longer than driving it myself). For comparison, I checked Expedia to see how much it would cost me to fly from Salt Lake City to Las Vegas and it was $133 and take me only an hour and a half.

Why would anyone take the bus when flying costs only thirty bucks more?

I thought that maybe there would be better savings if I tried comparing a bus ride and flight from Salt Lake City to New York. There IS a better savings ($100 VS. $278), but the difference in travel time is 53 hours VS. 8 hours. Is it worth $178 to save 2 DAYS of travel time? To me, it is, so I wonder how Greyhound stays in business. They can barely compete on pricing and lose EVERY time when they compete on travel time.

The future of bus travel? Sorry, Greyhound. Wi-fi and electrical outlets just can’t compete with saving TWO DAYS of travel time. In fact, the future of bus travel looks a lot like the past…

Greyhound 1948: click to see full size

Ad via: vintage_ads: Greyhound 1948

2 Comments »

  1. I know. The greyhound is more expensive than driving, which makes no sense because the only reason people would want to take a bus in the first place is to save money. A trip from the city I live in to the city i grew up in costs $25 (one way) and on the greyhound it costs over $50.

    Comment by laura — May 2, 2011 @ 4:15 pm

  2. The $25 trip is by car, just to clarify

    Comment by laura — May 2, 2011 @ 4:16 pm

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Leave a comment

-

Powered by WordPress
(c) 2005-2017 Michael Moncur, Laura Moncur, and Starling Studios