My experience with FlixBus was incredibly frustrating.
About halfway through my trip to Mississauga, our bus broke down because a belt snapped. The bus wasn’t just going to one place either, it had multiple stops along the way, so other buses started showing up to pick up passengers who were going to different destinations.
While we were stranded in this small gravel parking lot beside the highway, someone somehow took my sister’s suitcase. We only found out when my sister wanted to get off the bus to stretch and checked the luggage compartment. Since other passengers had been getting their luggage and leaving on different buses, the compartments were open.
Trying to get help was honestly a nightmare. The driver spoke very little English which made things difficult, the customer service line was basically useless, and when we asked the driver to call his manager he kept saying his manager was “too busy.” Like, what do you mean too busy? A passenger’s luggage is missing and we’re stranded beside a highway. For a while it felt like nobody from the company wanted to take responsibility or do anything to help.
Eventually we got ahold of the manager and found out another passenger had taken the suitcase by mistake. We described it, gave them the name on it, and after what felt like forever we were told it was in safe hands and would be delivered to where we were staying.
What I still don’t understand is how the passenger mixed up the luggage in the first place. My sister’s suitcase was a small white suitcase. The suitcase left behind was brown and almost three times bigger. They looked absolutely nothing alike. When we finally got on the replacement bus, there was an extra suitcase sitting there that didn’t belong to any of the remaining passengers, and later we stopped to drop it off, so we’re pretty sure that was the suitcase that got mixed up with my sister’s.
To make things worse, the replacement bus was late too, so we ended up stranded for about 3 hours total. Eventually we got to our destination and my sister’s suitcase was delivered to us, but the whole thing was way more stressful than it needed to be because of how poorly it was handled.
Would not recommend using this bus company. Their customer service is horrible and nobody seemed interested in helping until we basically forced the issue ourselves.
Thanks for reading.