Nycshuttle

Planned my trip to NYC, had heard of this bus by a number of people who recommended it, who’d used it in the past. Booked the bus because I’d heard there was Wi-​Fi and was excited to get work done on the way up using my tablet, I’d also heard there were power outlets & decent food. Bus showed up, no Wi-​Fi, no power outlets, food consisted of Honey Buns, pretzels & off-​brand chips, with bottled h20 & sodas. Good pricing at $ 65 for a one way, but the Wi-​Fi was the main reason I booked this bus, not providing it really put me in a terrible mood to start the trip. If you say you provide a service, do it. I will never book this shuttle again.

Left me and others at the Delaware mid-​stop. No contacts to the driver was given so we had to make no less than 10 calls to the NYCShuttle office, which often didn’t pick up and tried to circumvent our complaints, to make the bus come back. The driver was a nice lady but needed to be more systematic about checking for missing passengers in the future.
–No power sockets.
–Bathroom lights went off halfway.
–Hand soap in hand sanitizer dispenser instead.
–Bus was loud and shaky.
Will probably use it again b/​c of student discount price and convenience but leaving this review just because.

This used to be my favorite. Service and ride have unfortunately gone a little downhill. Amenities used to be much better. The drivers are still very nice, and it’s a decent price, but that too has been steadily increasing.

I’ve ridden NYCSHUTTLE 15 times since it first started up in 2004. Even when it began I wasn’t a huge fan, but as the price has steadily increased (I see today it’s gone up yet again) and the quality of the service steadily decreased, I’m afraid I’m no longer willing to put up with them.
Back when it first started I was annoyed by the whole «Starlight Express» thing. The web site proudly vaunted their bus by that name in which they’d replaced all the seats with roomily-​spaced rows of leather BMW seats instead, but despite riding them many times I never once ended up on this mythical bus. While the ones I ended up on instead were still comfortable, it certainly wasn’t the leather-​cloaked luxury portrayed on the web site. Once or twice I heard of a friend who’d ended up on it, but it was apparent that the described bus only accounted for a minority of the trips they made. While I resented being misled, I was willing to suffer that for the comfortable, non-​stop service.
During this time there seemed to be an annoying and not-​infrequent tendency for different drivers to forget to flip a switch to power on either the wireless Internet, the electrical outlets or both before we left. This is particularly annoying since they were usually unable to fix it until we’d stopped at Maryland House several hours later.
These annoyances were livable, however, until this past Christmas. I’d flown into Charlottesville for the holiday but needed a return trip, so my brother and I booked tickets on NYCSHUTTLE back to NYC. Showing up at E Market St., we noticed there were new buses. We assumed this to be good news, but as soon as we stepped on board our optimism was quickly scattered. Apparently NYCSHUTTLE had been bought, and the new owners were cutting back. Most of the seats on this new bus had reverted back to typical bus legroom, meaning my brother and I, both over 6′ tall, had to be careful to sit up straight in our seats and not slouch down over the next 7 hours lest our knees hit the seat in front of us. Additionally, the food on the bus, which had previously featured sandwiches, Bodos or H&H bagels, good-​quality cookies, Oranginas and the like, had been replaced with generic sodas, store-​bought bagels and no sandwiches at all. It was a huge step backwards in quality.
On top of this, NYCSHUTTLE has since raised the prices of tickets again, this time to $ 193, and cut Tuesdays and Wednesdays out of their schedule. (They say the latter is temporary, though they give no indication as to when that service will resume.) It also appears that service between NYC and Charlottesville will no longer be non-​stop, picking up a stop in Vienna, VA along the way.
So, while having raised the price of tickets, NYCSHUTTLE now offers fewer schedules, shorter leg room, less and poorer-​quality food and they will soon be making the trip longer to boot. In the meantime, Amtrak has lowered their Charlottesville round-​trips to $ 120, Delta flies to Richmond for $ 140 and you can sometimes even find US Airways flights straight into Charlottesville for $ 220. NYCSHUTTLE’s drivers have always been friendly and they always got us to our destination in a reasonable amount of time, but given the ever-​increasing cost, the corresponding decrease in quality and the improvement in competition, it just doesn’t make sense for me to take this bus anymore.