Passenger taken to Capetown instead of Bloemfontein

Subject: Unsatisfactory Service – Inter Cape bus services

I am writing this review following an incident which occurred on Friday 27 October 2017. I purchased a bus ticket with Intercape bus services for my daughter Cherise Lee-Bell to travel from Bloemfontein to Pretoria on Friday 27th October 2017. My other daughter would then collect her from the bus station in Pretoria and bring her to Thabazimbi for my wife’s 50th birthday celebrations. My daughter arrived at the bus terminal and was put onto a bus at midnight where she later fell asleep. On awakening at around 07h00 on Friday morning, she noticed sign boards starting to show Beauford West.

At the first opportunity when the bus stopped, my daughter consulted with the driver who then realized that they had loaded her onto the wrong bus as she was meant to be going to Pretoria. The driver contacted the offices and they requested that she stay on the bus until in Cape Town where they would make further arrangements.

Once in Cape Town the offices told her that they would arrange for her to get back onto a bus to travel back to Pretoria. This would mean that she had just travelled 13hrs on a bus from Bloemfontein and would now have to get back on another bus and travel another 15 or 16hrs further.

This arrangement would not work because I had no one to collect her in Pretoria at the time of night when the bus would arrive and the travelling durations were unacceptable, so I purchased a plane ticket from Cape Town to Lanzeria airport in JHB which now meant that I also had to travel an extra 400km by car to collect her from the airport to take her to Thabazimbi.

I raised a complaint on their website and was later told that Intercape was sorry and they would refund me with half of the bus ticket R274. • Cost of the bus ticket (Bloemfontein to Pretoria) - R 548.00 - Ticket No: ********** 207PK669 • Cost of the airplane ticket with Kalula.com - R 925.29

The trip would have originally would have cost me R548 in total, but after all the inconveniences, this trip cost me in the region of R2000.

To my knowledge the front desk is not permitted to allow people past unless they have produced their ticket showing from where to where and what bus they are scheduled to climb onto. The bus driver also has a manifest of people who must get onto his/her bus. If these simple rules were followed by Intercape personnel, this could have been prevented and would have saved me R1400.