Greyhound Canada cancelled my Buffalo, NY bus schedule, didn't tell me, cost me money and then refused to pay me back...

We've all had travel nightmare stories. I've been mostly lucky in my life, at least when it comes to the airline industry.

This story is small potatoes next to most airline horror stories we often hear about. But I thought I'd share it in the hopes of warning the public about Greyhound Canada, a company I used to respect but will no longer ride. This consumer complaints website about how Greyhound has screwed over other customers doesn't have a story nearly as bad as ours, so I feel compelled to share here.

My boyfriend and I booked return tickets from Toronto to the Buffalo, NY airport to catch a flight to Florida earlier this month.  We had ordered our Greyhound tickets in advance in June. On August 28th, I proceeded to the Greyhound terminal at Bay and Dundas in Toronto to pick up our tickets for the Sept 1st departure bus ride to Buffalo and the Sept 5th return ride back to Toronto.  The Greyhound employee saw our order number and printed out our tickets just fine.

The thing is - our return schedule back from the Buffalo airport to Toronto on September 5th had been cancelled. She didn't mention that to me. Greyhound had all of my contact information as I purchased the tickets online months earlier. They knew we were supposed to be on that 6:45 pm scheduled bus ride back from the U.S. to our home country. But they didn't bother to tell us. 

Fast forward to September 5th. Our flight back from Florida to Buffalo arrived back 45 minutes early so we wandered fairly tired around the bleak Buffalo airport trying to kill time.  Then after 2 hours, we went back to the bus pick-up/drop-off location just outside the Buffalo airport. The clock approached our supposed 6:45 pm pick-up. But as 6:45 pm came and went, no bus showed up. Had we been waiting in the wrong location? No. What had happened?  We had no idea.

I called the 1-800-661-TRIP phone number and got the automatic voice message system and was put on hold. Of course, this being the U.S., I had no roaming phone plan (as I hadn't used my phone for the entire trip.) I patiently waited for a human being to come on the phone to try to find out what happened to our bus ride. No Greyhound employee ever materialized.

After 10 minutes, I hung up knowing I was accruing roaming charges. I left my boyfriend by the bus stop and rushed into the airport to try to use a public phone. I found one inside but could no longer see the bus stop. There I called every Greyhound phone number I could find and couldn't get a single human being on the phone. I was on hold for almost an hour. My frustration grew into anger, which grew into despair.

By now, it was past 8 pm and I wandered back to the bus stop to rejoin my boyfriend. He then ran off to go to the bathroom inside the airport and try out the Greyhound website on his iPad as my iPhone internet connection wasn't able to get any schedule information from the Greyhound site. So I waited at the bus stop wondering what we would do. Would we have to pay for a flight home to Toronto? Would we have to get a hotel room and somehow figure out how to get home the next day?  We were exhausted and we just wanted to get home.  It was quite unpleasant considering we weren't even in our own country.

Finally my boyfriend returned to say he learned that Greyhound seemed to have 8:45 pm bus rides back from the Buffalo airport to Toronto the next night and all nights that week. Perhaps there would be one that night as well (although that day's schedules were gone from the Greyhound site.) Finally close to 8:45 pm, another Greyhound bus showed up. I explained the situation to the American driver who apologized and agreed to take us on the bus to the Buffalo station even though we had 6:45 pm tickets.

At the Buffalo bus terminal, the driver confirmed that Greyhound had cancelled our 6:45 pm schedule, but had not told us. I was extremely angry.

Then the farce got worse. We had to transfer buses at the Buffalo terminal, and then wait almost another hour for a late Canadian Greyhound driver to show up. The terminal refused to shut the luggage section on the side of the bus, leaving it open for anyone to gawk at.  I demanded they shut it, but the terminal staffer said it was the Greyhound driver's responsibility to shut it.  I kept a watchful eye on it, frequently hopping off the bus to make sure no thieves came along to steal our luggage. Finally, the unapologetic driver showed up without an explanation and took us across the border. Then a thunder storm hit Ontario, making the ride even more distressful.

By the time we got back to Toronto at 12:45 am, I was livid. I marched into the Toronto bus terminal and gave the Greyhound employee behind the counter a piece of my mind. He seemed more concerned with shutting me up than apologizing. I asked how Greyhound could cancel our schedule, leave us stranded in Buffalo and not inform us even though they had my contact information. He wouldn't answer. I asked if he cared how it felt to be on hold for over an hour, incurring roaming charges, to never reach a human being while stranded and worried. No explanation. In sad, but true private sector form, he just offered us a reimbursement for our ride from hell. I asked what about the extra roaming phone charges I incurred. He told me I'd have to take that up with upper management. I did.

After some emailing, Greyhound Canada's Vanessa Noriega informed me that:  

"Greyhound is not liable for additional expenses. Unfortunately, we will not be able to honor your request...We hope you will not let this incident deter you from using our services and will give us another opportunity in the near future to prove we can be the most reliable and economical form of transportation to meet your needs."

To which I replied:

"You are able to honour my request but you won't. I will not be using your services again as I am afraid after I buy a ticket, you're going to cancel the schedule and not inform me, and put me through hell because of it, and when I incur expenses to try to find out what's happened, you won't reimburse me. I will be blogging about this outrage and doing my best to spread the message far and wide and make sure Greyhound loses business because of this. I'm sure in the end you will lose much more than $28.01 CDN. Foolish, stupid private company!"

Dear loyal readers, if you have any admiration or respect for me, or if you simply value good customer service and want to send a message to a company that doesn't, if at all possible, please boycott Greyhound Canada. I'll be doing so from now on.

TIFF '14: Benedict Cumberbatch's 'The Imitation Game' wins People's Choice Award

Due to vacations and work, I took it easy on TIFF this year, seeing only four movies.

But I'm happy to say that one of those four films was Morten Tyldum's excellent 'The Imitation Game,' (pictured) which today won the People's Choice Award at the festival.  

Considering previous TIFF People's Choice winners include Oscar Best Picture winners like '12 Years a Slave,' 'The King's Speech,' and 'Slumdog Millionaire,' this bodes well for 'Imitation Game's' Oscar chances.  

And what a great result that would be for a film that chronicles the life and work of mostly unknown Alan Turing, a British mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, computer scientist, mathematical biologist, and marathon and ultra distance runner, who led efforts to successfully crack the Enigma code during World War II.  Winston Churchill said that Turing made the single biggest contribution to Allied victory in the war against Nazi Germany.  Turing's pivotal role in cracking intercepted coded messages enabled the Allies to defeat the Nazis in several crucial battles.

The film focuses mostly on those fascinating efforts, but does so while shining a light on a character, Turing, whose introverted/anti-social nature might usually have deemed him an unsuitable lead character for a feature film.  The fact that the audience overwhelmingly sympathizes with Turing is due mostly to the great performance by Benedict Cumberbatch.

As Variety puts it in their mostly positive review, "His Turing is a marvel to watch, comically aloof when confronted with as mundane a task as ordering lunch, but seething with the mad intensity of a zealot whenever anything risks impeding his work, and finally heartbreaking in his inability to cope with the cruel realities of the world outside Bletchley Park."

The film flashes back and forth between events around 1952 when Turing was arrested for gross indecency (something I committed last week, by the standards of Turing's time), to Turing's war efforts between 1939 and 1945, and Turing's youth where the shy, bullied lad briefly found platonic first love with a schoolmate named Christopher, whom he would later name his Enigma-breaking super-computer after.

By the end, the audience is left with a strong sense of sadness at the life of a mostly misunderstood and tormented man who, despite hiding most of his life from people, still contributed so greatly to his own time and all the decades since.  His work building the Christopher computer, capable of deciphering through millions of possibilities to break the German Enigma code, clearly formed the basis for the modern computer.   For him to die so young (age 41) makes obvious the profound loss and tragedy of this genius's life. 

Check out 'The Imitation Game' when you can! 

I also saw and quite loved 'The Theory of Everything' about the early life of another genius of our time, Stephen Hawking.   It was as impressive as 'The Imitation Game,' although perhaps not as tragic and poignant.  Star Eddie Redmayne was simply perfect as Stephen Hawking.  No doubt, Redmayne and Cumberbatch have great chances of landing Best Actor Oscar nods early next year.

The final two films I saw at TIFF this year were Abel Ferrara's 'Pasolini,' starring Willem Dafoe as the infamous Italian director/writer Pier Paolo Pasolini, which was interesting but not overly focused, and the stunning 'Love in the Time of Civil War,' by Quebec director Rodrigue Jean.

Jean's film about Montreal junkie hustlers who gravitate between hot sex and searching for their next hit, was a bit long but still hammered home the point of these sad, downward-spiraling lives.  As the lead, sexy and oft-naked Alexandre Landry (pictured above) holds nothing back and, despite looking often a bit grubby, still manages to be mesmerizing.   No wonder he was named by TIFF as one of four 'Rising Stars' this year.

There wasn't much love in this time of civil war, but that seems to be Jean's point in one of the better films I've seen on the subject.   This one deserves a wide, international release across the whole gay market, if you ask me.