Okay, take a minute and get a cup of coffee. This is going to be a long one.
I was in Austin for a work meeting the first week of December (2024). I planned to visit family in Houston the following weekend. Red Coach seemed to be the ideal Austin-Houston travel option - departing at 4:50 p.m. just five blocks from my meeting location and arriving in downtown Houston at 7:50 p.m., all for the bargain price of $24.99. A quick, easy bus ride - what could possibly go wrong?
The confusion started when I tried to find the Red Coach pickup location at 462 Red River St. There is no Red Coach signage in that area. I asked about the bus stop location at three nearby businesses and no one was quite sure, except to say that there have been some disagreements and that I should just look for the big red bus.
When the bus did not appear at 4:50 p.m. I called the phone number on the ticket. A recording told me to find the information in the bus tracker on their website. The bus tracker was showing a slight delay. Meanwhile another confused passenger showed up and I filled her in on what we'd learned. The bus arrived at about 5 p.m. and we departed soon thereafter.
And then the adventure began. A few minutes after our departure, we pulled over on the shoulder of a very busy highway in Kyle, TX. I was sitting on the left side of the bus and big trucks were thundering by, close and fast. The driver got off the bus onto the highway shoulder, and then six or seven people got on the bus. It appeared that these were other Red Coach passengers stranded on the side of the highway, who knows for how long. We set off again after the driver somehow managed to pull the bus off of the shoulder into very fast traffic (A+ for driving skills).
A little while later I checked our progress on Google Maps. This is when I realized that we were headed not for Houston, but for San Antonio. One of the passengers who boarded from the shoulder told me that San Antonio was their destination. Surprise!
I had received a single email from Red Coach at 5:03 p.m. (just about the time I boarded) saying that our bus would be delayed by one hour. No other information was provided.
Trapped on this unexpected diversion to San Antonio, we passed the Riverwalk at around 7 p.m. The driver, who had never been to San Antonio before, didn't know where the stop was. Passengers started calling out various stops to the driver. By this time, I had started a chat with a customer service agent on Red Coach's website. I asked about our ETA in Houston and the agent said 10:00 p.m. (roughly a two-hour delay). We hadn't received any other communications.
At about this time the two passengers behind me realized they were not in Houston. Because I was clearly the only person who had any information (from the chat), I did Red Coach's job and let the passengers know that we had picked up stranded Red Coach riders and were diverted to San Antonio.
Our tour of San Antonio continued as our driver tried to find her way in an unfamiliar city. I was still trying to find out our Houston ETA so I still had an active chat window open, and after a long period of silence the agent thoughtfully sent me a message with the address and geo-coordinates for Red Coach's San Antonio stop. I asked the agent if she expected me to help the driver navigate, a task that I reasonably considered to be outside of the job description for my new position as Red Coach on-site communications lead. No response. We dropped the last San Antonio passenger off well after 7:30 p.m.
Before we departed San Antonio we picked up a few Houston-bound passengers. They said that they had been waiting for the bus to Houston for more than five hours. Scoreboard: Of the three Red Coach bus trips I encountered that day, one was broken down on the side of a busy highway, one was three hours late (mine), and one was five hours late.
It was after 8:00 p.m. when we were finally on our way to Houston. I estimated our new ETA to Houston as 11:00 p.m. We still received no communications from Red Coach.
The bus stopped in Katy, TX. However, no passengers disembarked there. The two passengers behind me asked to use the bathroom in the gas station, so the driver let them off the bus. It turned out that they simply could not wait another 20 minutes until we reached our Houston destination to go shopping, so they spent some quality time picking out several bags full of snacks while the rest of us exhausted passengers waited.
My Red Coach bus finally reached downtown Houston at about 11:30 p.m., almost four hours after our promised 7:50 p.m. arrival. I had been on the bus for six and a half hours. Throughout this entire ordeal, we received no proactive communication from Red Coach except the initial email at 5:03 p.m. stating that there would be a one-hour delay. The only reason I had any information at all is because I had initiated a chat. A+ for the bus driver navigating all of this with clearly poor communication from her management. read more