Arriva UK Bus

This is a review of the app and bus service as a whole. First for the app, it’s laggy, the bus times shown aren’t accurate 80% of the time, there are never any warnings as to when a bus is going to be cancelled, and the delays are ridiculous. One positive to the app is that it’s the best alternative to the paper bus timetables as bus stops. This isn’t a very high bar though since most of the time the paper timetables are missing altogether from their stand and usually never get replaced. As for getting on a bus, you usually have to show up to your designated stop a little bit earlier as sometimes the bus driver drives way too fast and the bus is gone before the app tells you it is, leaving you confused as to where your bus is. Sometimes you can take your sweet time getting to a bus stop because somehow bus drivers manage to completely throw the designated bus times out the window and decide to take the bus on a leisurely drive around the region. It’s always a gamble. At an end of the line station, bus drivers also manage to delay a bus that hasn’t even been sent out yet. Surely if there are delays elsewhere you’d want to get your buses out as soon as you can? Ahh not for ARRIVA. Their alternative is to cancel the bus outright and since this is a BRITISH bus company, this often leaves you in miserable cold and wet weather. At least the bus fares are well, fair.

Please scrap this and bring the old app back into use. This is awful. With the old app it was so straight forwards, self explanatory, and easy. You just clicked where you wanted to be, journey planner, live map etc, you could flick backwards and forwards between the screens. With this, you don’t know where to click, once you go from map to find a journey, it just takes over the whole map, and no where to click off it. Have to come out and reload the whole app. I don’t know if there is a simpler way to do it, but why you would want to make things hard for people to use, I don’t know. To be honest, I’ve gave up on it. When I want to check a bus time now, it’s quicker to use google than fiddling about with this. You could at least put a live map back on as well. All you get on here now is a map showing you your route. No live map to see where the buses actually are. If it’s supposed to be, then it’s just something else that isn’t working. Also, on trip planner, the locations keep disappearing. Some days I can type in where I want to go, sometimes the location is already in the list, but other days the exact same location just won’t come up. Seriously, this app just causes extra stress to people at a time when things are already stressful enough? Why on earth get rid of the old app when it worked perfectly and there was nothing wrong with it, just to replace it with this useless thing?

Imagine launching an app this bad. The original ticket app worked perfectly fine and this one has just caused me so many issues and stress I do not need. First of all, the tickets half the time don’t even work, it comes up with an error message basically telling me to contact customer service and if I’m lucky after closing the app 9 times and restarting my phone I can finally load the ticket. That’s if I’m lucky. Most of the time they don’t load at all no matter how many times you try and get it to. I even tried logging out to see if that worked and when I logged back in it said I couldn’t open the ticket as it was active on another device??? What an absolute joke. I’ve had to ring for a refund of two tickets alrealdy, and I cant even ring for my weekly ticket to be refunded, the one I spent my final change for the week on, as arriva don’t have customer support on a Saturday. Or Sunday. And guess what it’s bank holiday Monday after that. How am I going to get to work? Now on the rare occasion it does work, law and behold, it still has lots of problems. First one being that you can’t even load the ticket without WiFi. I don’t see why not? You could on the original app? Second issue being every time you scan it you have to stop it opening your Apple Pay, and basically accidentally buying a ticket with your bank card every time. Or getting your card declined by arriva so much to the point your Apple Pay doesn’t even work anymore. I hate this app. And i really wanted it to be good, easy and efficient but it is just the complete opposite. Hope these issues get sorted soon.