What good is live tracking data if I cannot act on it?

This morning I was meant to take Flixbus 1324 from Amsterdam Sloterdijk to Berlin ZOB, booked because Deutsche Bahn train drivers are striking today. Needs must and all that. The timetable for the service is departing Sloterdijk at 06:10 and arriving ZOB at 16:20, before the bus continues onwards to Warszawa.

At 01:24 (when I was asleep) I received an email from Flix stating my departure was “stark verspätet” (heavily delayed), and a further email at 05:26 (so 44 minutes before scheduled departure) stating a delay of 120 minutes – shown here.

OK, I thought, I’ll doze an hour more, and get to Sloterdijk an hour before the delayed departure – at about 07:10. Only then at 06:30 I checked the live tracking for the service… and discovered the bus had departed at 06:24 – without me on it.

Now I understand that those live tracking details are always non-binding – it is my fault if I miss the bus – but I simply do not know what I am supposed to do with information at 05:26 stating my bus will depart at 08:10. Is it supposed to mean “go to Sloterdijk and just be ready to wait in the cold for two hours?”

As if that were not annoying enough, the bus then spend some absurd amount of time in Utrecht – and departed from there more or less at the time it’d have done, had it left Sloterdijk with a delay of two hours (see screenshot). But that was not communicated by email at all. “The bus is being held in Utrecht, board it there!” would have been useful information, but that was not said.

So it was back to the train – I had a train ticket anyway – and try my luck despite the strike. And I got lucky – Amsterdam – Utrecht – Hengelo – Bielefeld… and there was a delayed ICE to Berlin, and I hopped on it.

When I hit publish on this I will be in Spandau, while the Flixbus will not have even got to Hannover. Or maybe it has? Because how am I supposed to know if I can trust the live running information?

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