Double Happiness Travel

Posted by Milos Sugovic 

This weekend I learned it the hard way – you get what you pay for. Like many New Yorkers, I looked to get out of the city for the Easter weekend and headed down to Washington. My mode of transportation: Eastern Travel, a Chinatown bus that’ll take anyone with a $20 bill and the willingness to watch “Shaolin Soccer” for five straight hours. I thought the quality of service hit rock bottom about a year ago when we were stranded on the Washington-Baltimore Parkway for about 30 minutes, after which a delayed act of Buddha miraculously kick-started the engine. Well, this weekend was worse.

I decided to beat the traffic and take the bus down on Thursday after my class concluded at 8 p.m. (hence my decision to go with the low-cost alternative) and boy was I in for a treat. The bus driver, a rookie for the calling, departed from Chinatown at 9 p.m. to pick up passengers at Penn Station. You’d think the trip would take less than an hour, unless of course, the driver isn’t familiar with New York City’s grid and is desperately looking for Houston Street (still puzzles me why). It took several individuals at the front and a couple of iPhone navigation systems to get us safely to Penn Station. And that was only round one.

 

Round two started when we departed from New York City at around 10:30 p.m. (oh, did I mention this was a bus originally scheduled to depart at 7 p.m.?!?!) only to find ourselves stranded at a random location in New Jersey about an hour later. The driver decided to drop us off at an undisclosed location so as to transfer all passengers. Last time I checked, this was a non-stop trip. So we waited there for the trusty Coach USA to pick us up. Who knew there was an affiliation between this legit company and a borderline illegal operation? 

Anyway, long story short, we “landed” in D.C. at around 3 a.m., and I thought to myself “I would’ve been in Serbia (my home country) in about the same amount of time!” Airlines aren’t much better at handling delays, but at least they have advanced navigation systems for their pilots. 

But here is what’s interesting about the Double Happiness Travel (yes, that’s the name of a company) business model: these guys buy busses with bank loans they never plan to pay back and run the vehicles into the ground. By that point, the banks repossess the purchase and they’re off the hook. Effectively, the fixed cost is completely externalized onto the banks with the variable cost such as gas and wages deducted from total revenue. So when the capital is taken away, the entrepreneurs of this lucrative business open up another company with a different name.  And that is how the saga continues. That’s why we have bus operators such as 2000 New Century Travel registered as 2003 New Century Travel (look at site bottom). You’d think the banks would figure it out even though they have bigger fish to keep an eye on.  

At the end of the day, I knew what I was getting myself into, and at least I got a good story out of it. But there’s an important takeaway: know your business counterpart and the nature of the transaction. If it’s cheap, there’s a reason, and nine times out of ten you don’t want to find out why. Companies that have horrible customer service don’t care about their reputation, and anyone wishing to maintain a decent position in the public’s eye should distance themselves from such business partners. I will be labeled, from here on out, as the “Double Happiness Frequent Flyer.” But that’s the price I must pay for poor decision-making. 

Comments

[Bahamas Travel]

Will try double happiness travel sounds good to me.

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