National Express and Trustpilot

As another one of my irrelevant asides that are of interest to only me, I wondered last week how National Express were getting such high marks on Trustpilot.

National Express manage 4.2/5 which is “great” according to Trustpilot’s scheme, whereas Flixbus score 2.1/5 which is “poor” and Megabus score 2.0/5 which is also “poor”. Given that I can’t believe National Express are actually any better than their rivals, this felt a bit strange.

It becomes clear from these feedback e-mails that National Express send to customers. If you click on the green happy icon (as I was a few weeks ago) you’re taken to a long questionnaire about how great National Express are, with the facility to leave feedback on external sites. If you click the red unhappy icon (as I was last week), it just says how sad they are that you weren’t happy. No attempt to collect feedback why and of course, no forwarding onto any external sites.

Nothing wrong with all of this (indeed I’m sure National Express are very impressed at what they’ve done to skew the results), just a reminder of how bloody useless Trustpilot is at measuring anything.