Flour Power

If you thought that 5€ to go from Galway to Dublin Airport was still too expensive, here's a price reduction - now it only costs 1€! Yes, that's correct, 1€ for a 217Km bus journey!

It's part of Citylink's campaign for their new "Non-Stop" service, that also includes the routes from Galway to Cork, Shannon Airport and Clifden:

The "Super Singles" ticket is available 7 days a week but must be bought, in advance, through Citylink’s on-line sales reservation service.

Tickets will be made available in limited numbers, so it’s essential that travellers book their tickets early in order to secure themselves the most affordable travel ticket Ireland has ever seen.

If the price of the bus ticket when planning trips was already an afterthought, now it's even less than that, because it's almost free. I pay more for the bus ticket to get to work...

The only thing missing now is a late bus from Dublin Airport to Galway. The last one is at 21:15, and in the last couple of trips I've arrived later than that and the only option was Gobus. And speaking about GoBus, I'm curious to see what they do about this. First they had the WiFi (which, by the way, I never managed to get to work) and the WC services to justify the triple price (€15). And they could also argue that their service was faster because it was non-stop. But it seems that Citylink now provides all that for MUCH less. Either GoBus lowers their prices or invents some other service that compensates for a price 15x higher.

Strippers?

The image above shows the closest I could get from the WiFi service on board of a gobus coach… That was after accepting the terms and conditions and answering questions about my opinion about the service. Yes, they did ask my opinion about it before I even used the damn thing…

Now it’s safe to say the service wasn’t that good, don’t you think?

I got all hyped up when I got the news that Gobus would start providing free on-board WiFi and was eager to test it. And now that I actually get to do it, it just doesn’t work. Big fail.

Well, at least I do have an opinion now, if they ask me again.

UPDATE: On the way back I tried to use the Citylink service, and didn't work either. And it seems they're both using the same system (fleetconnect). Well, considering that I have friends who managed to get it working, I'm wondering if it's some kind of operating system incompatibility.

A €15 single ticket and about €20 return ticket from Galway to Dublin was quite a good deal already. Quite cheap for a trip of more than 200Km. The worst part was the huge amount of time it took. Since the bus stopped in a lot of small towns, it took it at least 3 and a half hours, and it could be as long as 5 hours.

Well, just recently (9th of March, apparently) Gobus started offering a new non-stop service that's supposed to take only 2h45m. That would be good news in itself, but to make it even better this new service includes free Wifi! The trips just became a lot less boring! And to make it even better, the price came down as well: only €10 (it's a flat rate, though). I haven't used the service yet (I didn't know about it when I went to Dublin for St. Patrick's), but I'll surely try it the next time I go to the capital.

And what happens when such a compelling service comes into the market? The competitors have to respond to it in order not to lose all their customers. And that's what Citylink did by starting a campaign with €5 tickets to both Dublin City and Dublin Airport. It's an offer with limited availability and bookings have to be made in advance and on their website. Only 5€ for a 200Km trip? That's insanely cheap!

Hooray for competition!