I’m here today with another travel saga for you. But first, I need to set the stage. In my retirement I’ve been chasing the sun. I prefer to go places that are 70 and sunny and move around the country and the world following that climate.
A few years ago I realized that even the Northeastern US was getting a bit too hot for me in the summer and I knew I never wanted to experience a hot as hell Georgia summer again if I could help it 🙂 . So I looked for another destination. Enter: Montréal, Canada 🙂 .
I had visited Montréal twice before…in January, one of its coldest months when the city is under a pile of snow. However, its summer temperatures seemed to sit right in the sweet spot I was looking for and it’s a fairly easy city to reach from the northeast US…or so it would seem 😉 .
Getting To Montréal: Flight Edition
Originally I was going to take Amtrak to Montréal because my Partner loves trains and I try to indulge that preference whenever I can. However, that sadly wasn’t in the cards.
Previously I’d checked and saw that there was an Amtrak train line that goes from NYC to Montréal. However, when I went to book my ticket…the Amtrak website said that route no longer existed. Weird 🙂 . Luckily I’m an adaptable lady and I looked into other options and decided to book a flight from Albany, NY to Montréal.
Well when my partner and I arrived at the airport, this happened:
Our flight was cancelled and we were rescheduled to the next day. My Chase Sapphire Preferred Card took a lot of stress out of the situation, but we still missed 1 of the 31 days we had in Montréal, which was less than ideal. However, we got there the next day and had a fantastic time. In fact, we agreed that Montréal might be the only city we would revisit annually because we loved it so much.
Then when we were leaving Montréal, something funny happened: the Border Patrol employee made fun of us for “flying such a short distance.” He asked why we didn’t just drive.
I didn’t feel like getting into the fact that he’s assuming I own a car, which I don’t and understandably renting a car and leaving it in another country is very expensive, so I just laughed and walked away.
However, I guess his comment got to me because I started looking at other options instead of flying back the next year, especially since the flight to Montréal wasn’t a seamless, quick experience like I was hoping. So Amtrak entered the chat once again 🙂 .
Getting To Montréal: Train Edition
So my partner and I compromised. We booked a train ride to get to Montréal and a Greyhound ride back (my preference was the Greyhound ride because it’s 3 hours or 35% shorter than the train).
Less than a month before our scheduled trip, I received an email that I thought was spam at first because it didn’t have any Amtrak branding on it and it said that my train had “changed.” However, when I looked to see what the “change” was, it was basically that the train was not happening. Instead of taking me from Albany, NY to Montréal, Canada, the train would now take me a 1 hour drive away to Saratoga Springs, NY. No discount or refund was offered 🙂 .
Since Amtrak would no longer be getting me to the country they promised, I wanted my money back. I tried canceling my reservation in the Amtrak app and on their website and both said they couldn’t find my reservation…really? I then tried to call their customer service and was told it was a long wait so I signed up for a callback.
In the meantime, Twitter came to the rescue. I’m never on Twitter anymore, but it’s still the fastest place I’ve found to hear back from a large company’s customer service. I DMed their customer service and they were able to send me a refund for my full trip.
Right after that finished I did receive a callback and they confirmed that they could see I was refunded and my ticket was canceled. Alrighty then.
Though hilariously, I received an email from Amtrak a few days before my intended departure date saying to get ready for my trip with Amtrak…Wow.
Getting To Montréal: Bus Edition
So in the end, I booked a ‘last minute’ (in my terms anyway) bus to Montréal that was 35% shorter time wise and only $20 more than the train ticket I bought a year ago. My ticket cost $69.47 including a fancy reserved seat at the front of the bus.
Originally I was excited about this trip because it seemed like Greyhound was fancy now. When I went through the booking process, they had the option to buy those assigned seats and they claimed the bus has streaming movies and free wifi now. What is this supposed luxury 😉 ?
“Don’t Call It A Comeback”?
My mindset before this Greyhound bus ride was excitement. I believed that Greyhound were trying to improve their image and compete with amenities that are expected on airlines these days for example. I hadn’t ridden a Greyhound bus in over a decade and thought it was fine, but I was optimistic to ride this bus and hopefully report that they were an affordable and now fancier option than they’d been in the past.
I kept getting emails from Greyhound after I booked talking about all the new amenities their buses have now and at the bottom of all these emails, they said that this bus is operated by Greyhound, which I thought was weird. I had assumed that a Greyhound bus ticket would get me a ride on Greyhound…right? Oh sweet naive Purple 🙂 .
In case the suspense is killing you, here’s a summary of what happened:
Now let’s get into the details.
Bus Details
- When: July 1, 2024
- Where: Albany, NY, USA to Montréal, Québec, Canada
- Bus: Greyhound/Flixbus 2679
- Bus Time: 5 hr 30 min
- Seat: Row 12
- Distance: 222 miles
- Cost: $69.47 USD
The Bus Terminal
Now this part I admit is fully my fault. I patted myself on the back for not having us travel near the 4th of July since holidays can understandably lead to delays. But I forgot about…Canada Day, which happens on July 1…the day of our travels. Oops!
I really need to find an easy way to check global holidays. Anyway, I heard that July 1 was Canada Day a few days before we were leaving, so I braced myself for some delays.
On the day of our departure, we arrived at the Albany Bus Terminal about 20 minutes before our bus, which one of the various emails from Greyhound had recommended. When I arrived, I walked up to the employee at the counter and she was very helpful and told me that it was Canada Day so there were delays and that my bus was going to be 40 minutes late. Alrighty – no worries.
I then sat down and saw that Greyhound had actually emailed me that exact same information along with a link to Track Greyhound Buses in real-time. Ooh – I love that shit!
So I settled in and took in the bus terminal. It was about as suspicious as usual, but surprisingly super empty compared to when I’d been there in the past. I was happy I had my noise cancelling headphones since one man decided to listen to TikTok at full volume for everyone to hear.
However, after a bit, my partner asked him to use headphones or turn it down and shockingly he did. I also noticed that the terminal had free Wifi, which was nice. So I caught up on emails and then started reading one of the million books on my list.
Curiously, I noticed that a minute before the bus’ new arrival time that was listed alongside its live location, it was still a ways away. Unsurprisingly, after the arrival time had passed, it updated to be another 18 minutes later.
Then it happened again and added 22 minutes. In the end, the bus arrived an hour and a half later than scheduled, which I would have minded less if they had properly updated the new arrival time before that time had passed…twice.
The Ride
Sadly, that wasn’t the last surprise to happen that day. Despite Greyhound insisting again and again (without me asking) that this bus was operated by Greyhound, the bus that arrived at the terminal was…a bright, lime green Flixbus. Hmmm.
As background, Greyhound and the budget option Flixbus entered a partnership. So I guess it’s now a crapshoot if you receive an actual Greyhound bus or a low-budget alternative.
The bus pulled up outside the terminal and then it was chaos 🙂 . There was no announcement for what bus had arrived or that it was boarding, so everyone went outside. Previously when I had boarded a bus at this terminal, people had lined up inside the terminal and an employee checked your ticket, you got on the bus and everything ran efficiently.
Not here 🙂 . There was a glob of people surrounding the bus and people kept asking if this was the bus to Queens. I tried to help one woman by saying no it was going to “Montréal”…and when she looked at me blankly, I added “…Québec?” and when the blank look continued I said “Canada?” to which she turned to someone to ask if this bus was going to Queens. Oh well 🙂 – I tried.
We then noticed that the space under the bus looked full and I saw a family going to the other side of the bus and I followed to see if there was space on that side. There was. There was also an employee checking their tickets and passports. I loaded my backpack under the bus and they then checked my documents as well.
The employee then told me to take any seat we saw empty. I replied that we had reserved seats (which as you remember we paid extra for) and the employee shook his head sadly like that wasn’t a thing. Uh oh 🙂 .
The Seat & Amenities (Or Lack Thereof)
So we boarded the bus and instead of sitting in the 2nd row we paid for, I found a seat in the 2nd to last row. One kind thing that happened was that after I sat down, the person next to my partner asked if I’d like to move up one seat and sit with him, which I accepted. However, this turned out to be a bit of a mistake.
The seat we were in was in Row 12 and the people in front of us had their seats all the way back. It was quite claustrophobic. As a rule, I very rarely push my seat back to give other people as much room as possible, especially since the last row of the bus behind us couldn’t move back at all.
I also later discovered that this seat is in the wheel well, so this window seat had even less than normal foot space. I tried to get comfortable and turn on the free Wifi Greyhound had constantly advertised and to check out this new streaming option only to find…the wifi didn’t work and the streaming didn’t seem to exist 🙂 .
So I kept trying to get comfortable in my seat only to find it basically impossible. I’ve been on a lot of airplanes in economy and these seats felt even smaller than that, which I didn’t know was possible. The seat headrests are also curved around your head and not adjustable, so you have to be sitting exactly in the center with your head straight, which wasn’t comfortable to me. The seat base is also so short that even my relatively normal sized legs felt unsupported. All that happened when I was in the aisle seat.
My partner noticed all my wiggling and asked if I wanted to try his seat instead. Too kind. So I moved to the window and that’s when I discovered the wheel well situation. However, I was able to put my leg on top of it and was more comfortable than in the aisle thank goodness. I then discovered that my footrest was broken…le sigh.
At this point, I started noticing what else was happening in the cabin. The overhead florescent blue lights you could usually turn on and off for reading were all turned on…and the button to turn them off didn’t work. It was blasting me directly in the eye so I started rummaging around for my eyemask, which I also wanted because there were no shades or anything on the bus and the sides are basically glass, so the sun was beating down on my window seat.
Luckily, I was looking for a good tan and the AC worked – otherwise I would have been quite miserable. So I tried to focus on the positives – that outside the seat thing most people were being quiet – and I got down to reading a book.
Plattsburgh
Luckily about an hour into the ride, the overhead lights turned off. And a little while later we arrived at the Plattsburgh stop, which was…a gas station?
I’d never seen that before, but some people got off the bus with their bags, others boarded, and then we stayed a little longer so maybe they were filling up the bus with gas too. Later on when I posted about this experience on Insta, someone mentioned that Greyhound has been getting rid of their bus terminals. I had no idea. Luckily we didn’t stay long and were soon off to the Canadian border.
Border Control
I was curious how long this border crossing would take since I accidentally picked to travel during a major holiday and because of our delay, we were arriving during rush hour *facepalm to the extreme.* I had been tracking the previous bus that took this route the same day and interestingly, they left Albany at 11am and were scheduled to arrive only 30 minutes before our original time despite departing 2 hours before our scheduled time.
So I’m glad I didn’t pick that bus that had an unnecessary 7.5 hour instead of our 5.5 hour trip, but while tracking that bus, it seemed that they got through the border crossing in less than 35 minutes around 5 pm, which gave me some hope.
When we arrived at the border, our bus joined a line with trucks to the right of the passenger line, which was much longer than ours. We waited in that bus line for 40 minutes and then drove through to a bus terminal. They then told us to grab all of our bags (including checked ones under the bus), get off the bus and get into a line to have our passport checked. Interestingly, I heard the bus driver saying that they don’t always make everyone get off the bus…I guess our group just looked suspicious 🙂 .
We grabbed all of our bags and got into the line and it went fairly quickly. We were then interviewed by a border control employee who asked where we’re from, how long we were staying in Canada, where we were staying, if we’d already booked it, if we had our return tickets and what we do for work.
After that, we put our bags back on the bus and returned to our seats. Shortly after getting to our seats, the bus was on its way. This whole border control process took an hour. Not bad.
Arrival
In the end, our bus left 1.5 hours late and arrived at Gare d’Autocars de Montréal 1 hour late, which is not bad for all that happened. When we got off the bus, I walked into Gare d’Autocars de Montréal and was impressed to see it was super cute, small and clean.
I then called a reasonably priced Uber that came immediately, but was curiously a taxi. While we were putting our bags in the car another taxi driver started trying to talk to us in French that went way over my head despite studying it for 7 years.
He quickly realized we were useless in the language and started talking to our (apparently turncoat?) Taxi/Uber driver. I don’t know what was said, but soon after we were on our way without confrontation. We then got to our Airbnb and settled in for months of Canadian fun!
The Review
So I obviously didn’t have the best time on this bus ride. It wasn’t the worst way to travel that I’ve ever experienced by any means, but the expectations Greyhound set compared to the service that was actually delivered, really threw me. They seem to be trying to rebrand as a fancier way to travel, but that was so far from my experience that I was more disappointed than anything.
Why mention that this bus is DEFINITELY operated by Greyhound when it is very obviously not? Why make people pay extra and double extra in our case for 2nd row seats only to not actually have assigned seats? (That part reeks of a scam to me). And why advertise everywhere that you have free wifi and movie streaming when neither of those things are true?
But besides the mismatched expectations and delivery, I was very disappointed in how uncomfortable the seats on the bus were. Between that and the multiple things that were broken or not working properly, I can’t recommend riding Greyhound in its current state and that makes me really sad. With the changes they were advertising, I wanted to fall in love with this new Greyhound and be able to have this as an affordable travel option, but that’s obviously not what happened 🙂 .
However, there were some positives. The employees I interacted with on my day of travel were all kind and helpful. The woman who worked at the bus terminal was friendly and though the employees that boarded our bus were disorganized, they were nice.
I also appreciate that Greyhound now has a tracking site with accurate geographic information, even if the arrival times don’t update accordingly in real-time. The customer service after this experience gets 0 points though. I contacted them just to see what would happen and was unsurprised to find that the answer was….nothing 🙂 .
I talked to someone on the Greyhound website via chat and was told to instead fill out a form about not receiving what I paid for (the assigned seats). That was done 2 weeks ago and I’ve heard nothing back – not even an email confirming they received my note. Oh well.
Conclusion
So I’m happy I found an affordable solution at the last minute and got to Montréal safely, but my hope for a Greyhound comeback did not materialize. I do have another Greyhound reservation this year that I’m planning to keep just to gather more data and see if this lackluster experience is the ‘new’ Greyhound normal.
I did also see that I can remove add-ons online, such as my seat reservation, but I decided to keep it for next one just to see what happens. For science! So I’ll be reporting back how that goes in the coming months. Stay tuned 😉 .
What’s a surprising travel experience you had lately?
I’m convinced greyhound is the worst company in America (sorry Comcast/Xfinity). About a year ago my wife and I booked tickets with them to go from WA to the OR/CA border because we didn’t want to have a car where we were going.
The bus was to pick us up in our home town at 3am in legitimately shady area (there was no station, just a stop). We had a friend drop us off, and sat, sat, sat… but the bus never came. Called greyhound after a couple hours and eventually got through to a person, who said the bus broke down but we could reschedule for the next day. We said we would have appreciated a notification, but I guess tomorrow it is. The local buses didn’t run that early so we walked home.
The next day we were back before 3am with an app tracking the bus as it came toward us. “Here it comes.” “It’s getting off the freeway.” “There it goes.” It never stopped at the bus stop. We walked home again.
To cut a long story short, they absolutely refused a refund, and said “You can try again tomorrow.” F-that we we’re two days late already. The cc company eventually covered it after a lot of arguing because I insisted it was fraud, which I think it really is to sell someone a service which you do not provide. Somewhere since then I read an article about Greyhound that reported this was pretty common and that customers basically had no recourse because of an absence of effective regulation.
As for Flixbus, we use it all the time in Europe and though there is sometimes a small measure of chaos I’m very happy with their services there, where I believe they are very well regulated, unlike in the US.
But in the US I will never use either again.
Thank you for sharing. That is all very good to know and very sad to hear.
In my college years I took Greyhound often, and I never had a great experience with them. The buses were crowded, dirty and always late. It sounds like they haven’t improved. It’s nice that they have a tracking website now, but if it doesn’t update in real time, that just gives you false hope!
When I went to Saratoga Springs last fall to see Vienna Teng, I gave the bus another try, since it was the most direct route from NYC that didn’t involve driving myself. I took Trailways from NYC. The bus was clean and comfortable, I’ll say that, but the wi-fi was extremely slow and spotty, and the power outlets didn’t work at all. It was a mediocre experience, but it got me there, and I guess that’s all I really cared about.
I’m sorry to hear that. This bus wasn’t dirty so I’ll give it that…and only that 🙂 . To clarify, the tracker updates the bus’ location in real time, but not the estimated arrival time. So when it said the bus would be there in 1 minute and I could see it was in another town I knew that wouldn’t be the case, but I could still track where the bus was.
I’ve used Trailways for short trips before (where I doubt I even tried to use the wifi or outlets) and had a good time. Good to know before I think about using them for a longer trip. Also woohoo Vienna Teng!
Hi dear, the blog is still skipping on iPhone even after cache clearing. Just a heads up!
Thanks for letting me know! What browser are you using and what iOS? That will help me troubleshoot the problem since I’m not seeing it on any iPhones that I use.
Mine is on iPad as well. Using Safari.
Thank you!
I’ve done the New York City – Montreal bus before.
So Frankfurt – NYC with Singapore airlines , then the bus to Mtl.
it’s actually a “travel hack” for budget travelers from Montrealers. show up at USA customs, admit you are a cheap skate and u are taking the bus to go home. lol
Oh that’s interesting – I haven’t heard of that before. Getting off a long flight and taking a long bus is hardcore.
Sorry to hear about all the travel turmoil. I must admit I have never used Flixbus or Flixtrain in Germany (where both Flix and I are from). I prefer either car or the German Bundesbahn as the busses take longer and the Flixtrains are not very reliable. What I didn’t know is that Flix bought Greyhound and is now also operating under Flixbus in the US. So thank you for your post! I hope they get their act together because in general Flixbus is a great solution if you want to travel without a lot of cost (and if you have the time :))
Oh wow – I didn’t know they had a Flixtrain too. And yeah I was all about budget buses when I went around Europe in my ‘youth’, but now comfort and ease is more important to me than cost.
Ahh, yes Flixbus. One of the worst things to come out of Germany. Ever. (Truly can’t recall anything worse ;)).
I had the pleasure of booking a trip with them way back (maybe 12 years ago?) when long distance travel was deregulated here and the Deutsche Bahn was no longer allowed a monopoly. They were terrible back then and still are. I avoid them at any cost. 😀
They are regularly in the press for their terrible treatment of drivers and passengers. Only a few month back there was a fatal accident with a Flixbus bus in Germany. Pretty tragic.
On the other hand, I had a lovely experience with the “real” Greyhound in Canada back in 2018. I believe I was going between Quebec City and Montreal and remember the excitement of traveling with one of the iconic busses.
I have to agree with your partner though – trains rule!
You just made me snort so you thank you for that lol. Good to know this isn’t just a Flixbus in the US issue – I’ll have to check out their German press articles. That’s horrible! I’m glad you had a lovely experience with “old” Greyhound – I rarely hear about the good trips.
And I do enjoy trains, but not when they’re cancelled a few weeks before our trip like Amtrak did to us this summer. Unfortunately I don’t trust them on this route to Canada anymore.