Monday 31 December 2012

5 tips to save money in 2013.


1. If different members of your family use the bus but on different days then share a 10 trip ticket. Saving over 30% on single fares.

2. Take the kids to school by bus. Buy any unlimited travel ticket and upto 2 kids travel free.

3.Dont want to commit to buying a 2 trip ticket as you don't know when you are coming back. Pick up our loyalty leaflet and with for every 6 single tickets you buy get one free.

4. All unlimited travel tickets can be bought as mobile tickets at discounted rates. Save £2 on a 7 day ticket.

5. Register for a fair fares card and you will receive exclusive offers that could save you 50% on your normal fares.

Friday 28 December 2012

Gold Card

Lots of our Goldclub cards are starting to expire and lots of you are asking what happens next. We have decided to merge the gold card with our fairfares card. To get BUzz prices before 9.30 you will now need your concession card and your fair fares/local card. Sign up for your card at https://www.facebook.com/Premierebus/app_100265896690345

Saturday 29 September 2012

Save the Red Flyer

Since announcing that we will finish operating the red flyer in November we have been inundated with customers asking what they can do to save the service. Our decision to cancel the service came because we were losing just short of £1000 a week. But lots of you have been contacting us saying that you would be willing to pay double for your travel as it is still cheaper than the car.

We want to save the service but to do this we need to increase the revenue. To increase the revenue we need to charge more and promote the service to get more passengers. We think we can do this with your help.

Introducing club flyer, we need 75 people to commit to paying £70 a month for there travel. This will replace the red card which will no longer be valid on the red flyer. All prices on red flyer will be increased but here is the twist. When the service makes a profit we will reduce the price of those club flyer users.

We will trial this from next Monday and if in two weeks the service is making a profit we will make an application to reverse the cancellation of the service.

The key to saving the service also hinges on getting more people to use the service so let us know where we are missing a trick in promoting the service.

The future of the red flyer service is in OUR hands.

Friday 27 July 2012

#fairfares - 25% price increase

That's right some of our fares are going up by 25%. Do you want to know why? We don't want you buy them.

How many times do you go somewhere and not come back?
From next Monday all our single fares will be going up. But if you were coming back anyway or even catching the bus later in the week it would have been cheaper to buy a 2 trip.

On some routes it will be just an extra 50p to buy a 2 trip.

Customers travelling on multi trip tickets get on the bus quicker so everyone gets to there destination that little bit quicker.

So the message is ditch single tickets and switch to our 2trip or 10trip options or you might find yourself paying more for your bus from next Monday.

Red 5 Long Eaton to Nottingham single £1.50 2trip £2 and 10trip £8
Red 8 Hucknall to Nottingham single £1.50 2trip £2 and 10trip £8
Red 1 Bingham to Nottingham single £2.50 2 trip £3.50 10 trip £15
Red 7 Calverton to Nottingham single £2.50 2trip £3.50 10trip £15
Red 9 Loughborough to Nottingham single £3 2 trip £4.50 10trip £20



Monday 23 July 2012

#fairfares - the next step

So far the fair fares campaign has been a huge success with a significant increase in the number of customers from 6 months ago. However over the last few weeks this growth has slowed down.

This coincides with the punctuality of our services starting to slip. We know this is a key issue for our customers and our staff. No one likes to be late for anything and we want to make it better as soon as possible.

There are several reasons why our services start to become late. For example on the Red 5 ongoing roadworks for the tram mean that delays are becoming more regular. Whilst on Red 9 more people are travelling so we need to allow more time to operate the route.

The number of people travelling on services can start to have an impact on punctuality. One way we could decrease the journey time is for more people to have there ticket before getting on the bus. We hope to do this by making our unlimited travel and 10 trip tickets a better value option and we are now offering mobile tickets.

From Monday we will be using an extra vehicle on the Red 5 and will be making changes to the Red flyer. Both of these changes should significantly improve the punctuality for our customers. We have also used our GPS data to make changes to Local 17, Red 8 and Red 9 which will take effect from the end of September.

Rest assured that whilst we know that paying a fair fare is important to you, its just as important that we get you there on time.


Thursday 19 July 2012

Premiere: M - tickets

Premiere: M - tickets: The introduction of m tickets is proving popular with a steady stream of new customers with many now using the facility every week. Having y...

M - tickets

The introduction of m tickets is proving popular with a steady stream of new customers with many now using the facility every week. Having your bus ticket on your phone was a new concept for us but with the number now using them we are looking at ways we can make more ticket products available.

The feedback we are getting is that our customers like the convenience of being able to buy the ticket at anytime whilst not having to worry about carrying cash. It also makes it easier for Parents to buy there child's ticket in advance and avoids bus money going missing!

So far we have only tried a few ticket products but with the great feedback recieved we have decided to gradually make all tickets available as m tickets. Next month we are going to introduce our new BUzz term card and 10 trip.

Have you used m tickets? Let us know how we could make it better.



Friday 4 May 2012

Service improvements

It's been a bit quiet at premiere towers. No big launches no exciting news so we spent some time looking at how we can improve things for our customers.

This week has been spent preparing everything for the changes to the nottsbus services, red 8 and the new red 3. We are getting into quite a routine with service changes but it's always exciting to see everything coming together.

The new website was also launched this week. We have tried to keep it simple and easy to use. We made the change as it allows us to update the site ourselves and keep everyone up to date.

Mobile ticket trials have gone well and the main benefit seems to be convenience. We see the main challenge with this being people trusting the process and we will spend some time on this next week.

Friday 6 April 2012

#premiereprogress

It's been a busy last few weeks. We have hit our fair fares target for number of passengers. We have introduced m ticketing and we now run a service to east midlands airport.

By hitting our target for passengers we have been able to freeze our fares until at least July. We strongly felt that by keeping our fares as low as possible we could grow the number of passengers on our services. Part of the fair fares experiment is our ten trips for ten pounds offer. We wanted to encourage people that might be thinking about leaving the car at home to give the bus a chance.

Our m ticketing allows us to offer all our unlimited travel tickets as a paperless tickets. So far the trials have gone well and everyone seems happy with the simple process for buying. Whilst probably not right for everyone we hope that some people will find it a more convenient way of buying tickets.

Our red flyer service to the airport (redflyer.co.uk) has now taken off. Early passenger numbers have been encouraging and the support from staff at the airport has been fantastic. Our drivers are really enjoying working on what is out first commercial coach service. Hopefully the first of many.

Lastly we are currently carrying out trials on something that will be of real benefit to our passengers. More news soon

Friday 2 March 2012

Fair fares - momentum building

We are seeing strong support for our #fairfares campaign. With support coming from all areas of the community we really feel that the momentum is starting to build.

Our holiday and fairfares roadshows are being well received with people keen to talk to us about our fresh ideas on bus and coach services.

We are starting to distribute our fairfares keyrings. Keyring holders who follow us on twitter will be the first to be able to take advantage of our flash sales.

The main theme of our campaign is that with more customers we can maintain our low prices in the face of rising costs. We don't want to be going to the same customers and asking them to pay more.

We are always looking for new ways to promote our campaign and if you have any thought on this please let us know.

Sunday 5 February 2012

Fair fares - More passengers, lower price?

After spending a few days away we inevitably had to use buses. Everyday we had to use bendi buses, the buses were free but each day we had to stand up. Not an issue but what if this was our daily commute?

How much would you be willing to pay if you had to stand up everyday?

Should paying a fare guarantee you a seat?

Friday 27 January 2012

Fair Fares

An interesting day today reviewing our network. One of the main talking points centred around fare increases. We have been under increasing pressure due to insurance and fuel costs to increase our revenue to absorb these costs.

Inevitably there was the discussion around increasing fares and reducing costs. We do not like to increase our fares as this penalises the people that support us in what is a very difficult time. The only way that we can reduce the costs would be to reduce the timetables that we operate.

Then we had a bit of a Eureka moment. Rather than do either of those things what we really needed was to encourage more people to use our buses. If everyday each bus had an extra 10 people then we wouldnt need to increase our fares.
With the onus now on us we have decided that we will make a commitment that we will not increase our fares for the next 3 months. In that 3 months we will do everything possible to encourage those extra people to use our buses.

We hope that our customers will help us with this campaign which we are going to call #fairfares.

The progress of our campaign will be kept up to date on twitter and Facebook.

Any suggestions on how we can achieve our fair fares target of 10 extra passengers a day per bus will be very welcome.

Sunday 22 January 2012

Red Flyer

It's happening East Midlands Airport to Nottingham every hour. Usual premiere fares. Date of launch tbc. Please spread the word as we understand many people were worried they would be unable to get to work from Clifton

Monday 16 January 2012

Trio

Spent today reviewing our new group tickets. The most unique is our trio ticket which allows three adults to travel together all day for just £8.

Whilst we have sold a few trio tickets over the last two weeks we haven't sold as many as we would have liked. Big push needed from us to promote our duo and trio tickets for groups.

Nottingham skylink

Some big changes coming up on the Nottingham skylink which means that people living along the current route will not have direct access to the airport. We have received several phone calls and emails asking if we are going to replace the current service.

The answer is we hope so, we have meetings with the airport and council to see if we can work together on a solution. We are currently hoping to provide an hourly coach service along the current route.

More news on Friday.

Sunday 15 January 2012

Red card

Its been a few months since we launched what we feel is a massive step forward in travel cards. The principal behind the red card is that by committing to pay £10 a month you will get unlimited travel on our buses. Sounds fairly normal however we have missed out the exciting bit, whilst ever you are making that payment the price will not go up. That gives you fixed bus fares for life at just £10 a week.

This hopefully shows that having low fares is a key part of our business. We will always strive to keep our fares as low as possible and by making this commitment we hope that we will attract more customers so we can drop our fares even lower.

Lets blog

We have decided to start a blog to share our experiences of being part of premiere -Nottinghams local bus and coach operator.