Ohhh this isn’t a good look! Let’s see how the media treats this. I am sure they will find a way to blame it on the strikes.
While I am here and ranting, anyone else noticed the absolutely rubbish interviewing of strikers by the press? The journalists are supposed to be educated, they are supposed to be articulate! It’s just embarrassing the dumb questions they keep asking.
News channels/papers – “The strikers forced Avanti to give themselves a bonus. They had no other options!”
Forgive my ignorance, but why is a private company being paid government bonuses at all?
Bring back Virgin!
Avanti are shockingly poor and I can no longer get direct trains, journey is longer, more expensive, trains busier, cancellation always a risk.
We should be using trains more often because it’s greener, but instead we still have to use the car, and sit in the M6 car park because it’s the only way we can control it.
“the government handed the firm more than £6.5m in 2021 for “operational performance” and “customer experience”.”
Seriously? When they took over our local train station from Northern, they changed the ticket machines to ones that literally didn’t work. For months and months you couldn’t buy a ticket to Manchester. The ticket machines still make me want to run headfirst into a brick wall to this day. Doesn’t scream good operational performance or customer experience to me.
There’s clearly some sort of corruption going on behind the scenes here. Why else would you award a contract in which running on 4-out-of-7 of the required trains at 56% punctuality is a bonus earning performance which also justifies extending the contract for 6 months?
The reason this is happening is because the Tories cannot afford another privatised rail failure. Avanti want out and the government will do whatever it takes to convince them to stay on, despite the fact the service they are providing is appalling. Privatising the railways has failed. Renationalisation is the only way forward.
It’s a Conservative government, rewarding failure and incompetence is what they do.
There’s nothing stopping Avanti using that bonus to improve wages of the staff who were instrumental in hitting the targets. Well other than CEO and shareholder greed.
Virgin trains were substantially better than Avanti in every metric I care about.
Now it just feels like blatant piss taking. Remember this article when you’re looking at your next energy bill or shopping receipt,
My train was cancelled a fortnight ago. Luckily I was in the station early as I was planning on buying a nice sandwich for my table seat on the way home to Manchester, so managed to get on the earlier train. It was approx 1.5× capacity, people were standing shoulder to shoulder. I had to stand all the way home, got no work done and had to have my emergency double decker for my tea (not recommended for a diabetic).
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Ohhh this isn’t a good look! Let’s see how the media treats this. I am sure they will find a way to blame it on the strikes.
While I am here and ranting, anyone else noticed the absolutely rubbish interviewing of strikers by the press? The journalists are supposed to be educated, they are supposed to be articulate! It’s just embarrassing the dumb questions they keep asking.
News channels/papers – “The strikers forced Avanti to give themselves a bonus. They had no other options!”
Forgive my ignorance, but why is a private company being paid government bonuses at all?
Bring back Virgin!
Avanti are shockingly poor and I can no longer get direct trains, journey is longer, more expensive, trains busier, cancellation always a risk.
We should be using trains more often because it’s greener, but instead we still have to use the car, and sit in the M6 car park because it’s the only way we can control it.
“the government handed the firm more than £6.5m in 2021 for “operational performance” and “customer experience”.”
Seriously? When they took over our local train station from Northern, they changed the ticket machines to ones that literally didn’t work. For months and months you couldn’t buy a ticket to Manchester. The ticket machines still make me want to run headfirst into a brick wall to this day. Doesn’t scream good operational performance or customer experience to me.
There’s clearly some sort of corruption going on behind the scenes here. Why else would you award a contract in which running on 4-out-of-7 of the required trains at 56% punctuality is a bonus earning performance which also justifies extending the contract for 6 months?
The reason this is happening is because the Tories cannot afford another privatised rail failure. Avanti want out and the government will do whatever it takes to convince them to stay on, despite the fact the service they are providing is appalling. Privatising the railways has failed. Renationalisation is the only way forward.
It’s a Conservative government, rewarding failure and incompetence is what they do.
There’s nothing stopping Avanti using that bonus to improve wages of the staff who were instrumental in hitting the targets. Well other than CEO and shareholder greed.
Virgin trains were substantially better than Avanti in every metric I care about.
Now it just feels like blatant piss taking. Remember this article when you’re looking at your next energy bill or shopping receipt,
My train was cancelled a fortnight ago. Luckily I was in the station early as I was planning on buying a nice sandwich for my table seat on the way home to Manchester, so managed to get on the earlier train. It was approx 1.5× capacity, people were standing shoulder to shoulder. I had to stand all the way home, got no work done and had to have my emergency double decker for my tea (not recommended for a diabetic).