Below you will find my summary/review of our experience using Byway Travel services for our spring 2024 trip to France and Spain. This is followed by a reply/response to the review as well as Byway's summary of my phone conversation with the CEO, Cat Jones. She addressed our concerns directly, and as you see taking full responsibility for the problems we encountered.
5 May 2024, Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA.
My wife and I recently completed a 12-day journey using the services of Byway Travel. A UK-based company promoting slow travel using a lower carbon footprint Byway specializes in combining rail with accommodation. Typically the chosen lodgings are located within short walking distance to the central rail station. I learned of this company in an article in the Guardian newspaper and thought the business model not only sounded environmentally responsible but innovative as well.
We began the process by creating an account on their website. This allowed us to explore various trip itineraries and then save them. This was followed with a phone chat with one of their representatives to finalize the booking, subsequently paying a deposit. After the phone call a final booking/itinerary was saved to our account on the website. Payment was due at a set date before the trip after which we were to be given a Journey Guide (digital) with all the pertinent details of our trip, including lodging specifications, how to get to/from the station to the lodgings, various things to see and do in the vicinity, etc. all within a couple of weeks prior to departure. Tickets were to be provided shortly before departure, along with reservation e-tickets where required.
Our trip in April of 2024 began with one night in Paris, followed by a train to Spain where we spent three nights in Girona, three in Tarragona, and four in Barcelona before ending in Bordeaux, France. (We continued our trip on our own after Barcelona with four nights in Bordeaux followed by four in Paris.)
There are four parts to my review of Byway's services: accommodations, trains, staff, and value. 1.
1. Accommodations. By-and-large the hotels used for our journey were fine. All the beds were comfortable although room size varied. Indeed, one must pay very close attention to the various level of rooms available, particularly if you have specific requirements/needs. For example a couple of the rooms were quite small, which would be of little impact for overnight travelers but if you're spending several days (which we were in nearly every case but Paris), size can be an issue along with lack of storage and seating.
We also would have preferred showers in all but ended up with two hotels that had the older half-shower half-tub configurations using handheld shower heads. Awkward and less safe.
It would also be helpful to know if there was a safe in the room, something not always clear from the description.
Breakfasts were generally good with some variation in quality and quantity of items offered. We feel it is very important to start the day off with a good breakfast.
Directions to the hotels were clear and Byway's use of online maps in their Journey Guide worked very well except in one case: our hotel in Tarragona was all uphill from the station, which involved quite a few steep steps along with gentle ramps but, once at the top, the online directions had us unnecessarily going completely around the hotel to get to the entrance. Sloppy.
Still, the Journey Guide was well laid out and easy to use. Generally, the local details provided in the Guide for each city were helpful EXCEPT in Barcelona. Byway would usually provide restaurant recommendations close to each hotel but not in Barcelona, so we were on our own there.
2. Trains. We believe trains are by far the best means of seeing Europe and certainly when traveling from city to city. It is stress-free travel, comfortable and relaxing as you cruise along at 256 kms an hour. And we've ridden a lot of trains in Europe over the past two years. However, this proved to be the most frustrating and for me the most stressful aspect of using Byway.
Initially we were informed that we would receive our tickets and Journey Guide 14 days before departure. It was generally understood the "tickets" were in fact paper passes but the language was always a bit vague and I should have asked for greater clarity early on. It was only in later conversations with a staff member that the word "passes" was used.
Having used mobile Eurail passes in 2022, I was familiar with the mobile passes and didn't understand why they weren't used. When I asked about this there was some ambiguity about why they were paper passes. I have subsequently learned that in fact they were supposed to be mobile passes; paper passes were only provided if specifically asked for.
Anyway, we received the handful of e-ticket reservations (separate from full tickets or passes) along with the digital Journey Guide a few days late but still no passes. We did receive a Royal Mail tracking number from Byway on 27 March for the final tickets/passes (again lack of clarity in language) but the tracking number did not work and I had to deduce the actual FedEx tracking no. from the one I was given. Sloppy. Remember, we were due to depart 11 April and still no passes.
And that's when the stress kicked in.
I kept checking the FedEx website day after day, each time seeing that the package with our passes never got to FedEx, that is they never got beyond the creation of the FedEx label. When I inquired of Byway if there was a plan B, I was informed (by yet another different staff member) that if necessary we would be given mobile passes when we arrived in Europe. By now I was thinking this was not the most reliable of service companies, and was a bit skeptical.
Long story short: FedEx delivered our paper passes THE DAY BEFORE WE LEFT! One more day and we would've left the country without them.
Oh, and it should be noted that upon returning home to the US a bill from FedEx was waiting for us, apparently part of the cost of having the paper passes delivered to us!
Once we had them in hand, our experience of using the tickets/passes/reservations worked smoothly.
3. Staff. While not a staff issue per se it should be noted that my online booked journey in my Byway website account never updated with the changes made early on in our planned itinerary. We could only access the updated booking through a link sent in one email. If I had lost the email we wouldn't have access to the updated itinerary. When I mentioned this early on I was informed in rather vague terms that they were in the process of updating their software. In any event the booked journey never updated properly during our entire journey.
We were informed that once we booked we would be assigned a journey team but that never seemed to happen. During the issues that arose prior to departure we probably dealt with five or six different individuals. And while Byway was by-and-large responsive to emails, the fact that there was not one specific person to whom we could turn felt a bit unsettling.
4. Value. Based on our experience in April of 2024 and given that I have some experience in planning our own train journeys I would most likely NOT use Byway's services again. After some rough calculations of costs of purchasing our own Eurail passes (without the anxiety-inducing issues that arose with Byway) plus the time it would take researching our hotels (which often do not require payment upfront as it does with Byway) I would say the value for us is simply not there.
With Byway payment for the trains and accommodations is made well in advance. However, if one is a member of a worldwide hotel chain group such as Hilton, payment is typically not required until you check in/out and cancellation can often be factored in even with online sites such as Booking.com. While we didn't need to cancel a hotel, cancellation with a third party such as Byway might have proven more complicated. Platforms such as Booking.com also make it very easy to choose the right room for your needs.
The sloppiness of their web platform, inability of the staff to articulate exactly what was happening at any given time in the process, the confusion and lack of clarity regarding tickets/passes, down to being charged to have the passes delivered to us, combined with my preference to arranging trips on our own makes us wonder if their services are worth whatever their service fee might be.
Regarding overall value, it really comes down to asking yourself if you want to pay someone to handle arranging your trip. If so, it would be worth using a service such as Byway. Should you use Byway? That's a bit tougher. We most likely will not. I believe the company tried hard to do the best thing for us and as I mentioned they were certainly responsive. However there was so much uncertainty and ambiguity throughout the process that it left us feeling a bit hung out to dry.
10 May 2024 - Byway’s response to my summary/review and a reply to my conversation with the CEO and founder Cat Jones.
Dear Steve, Thank you very much for your time on the phone on Wednesday. I promised to come back to you today with the results of our investigation and a compensation offer, hence this email. Thank you for taking care of the FedEx payment in the meantime, we appreciate it. As I said, I am so sorry your trip wasn't relaxed and hassle-free and that we didn't provide the level of service we should have.
[There follows an offer of a small refund and a voucher for future Byway travel. I accepted the refund only.]
Having conducted our investigation, we have taken some actions to ensure your poor experience isn't repeated, and I thought you'd like to see the headlines:
- We purchased paper passes for your trip instead of mobile passes, as is our usual practice and default. This caused significant stress and uncertainty, including you being sent a bill by Fedex. I'm so sorry. This happened because of a manual action that was accidentally set to purchase paper passes. As I mentioned on the phone, we have now set up an automated process for booking passes to ensure there's no human in the way capable of making mistakes.
- There were tech issues, like your edited trip not updating in your customer account. This is a known issue tied up with a large software update we are making (we're on month 4 of a 5 month build) which will allow two systems that are currently separate to communicate with each other properly. At the moment user account system can only display trips as they are up to and before booking, and cannot display post-booking changes we make in our post booking system, which is why we have had to email you different links. I understand how inconvenient it is to have everything in different places. This tech work should be completed by June and by July the user accounts will be able to show booked trips with any changes complete in the live link.
- There were process issues, like receiving your Journey Guide and passes late and with unclear tracking numbers. I'm so sorry for this. I have now got a Journey Guide view in my CEO reporting dashboard that shows the number of Journey Guides due by day and the amount of capacity we have, so that I can better support managers to ensure we are appropriately resourced and customers don't feel the pain of our poor resource planning. I'm sorry this came too late for you and added further uncertainty.
- There were communication issues, like receiving communications from multiple different people who could not always provide quick answers/resolutions. We have conducted on-the-job training for the customer support team over the last week to ensure they are better equipped to answer customer queries, and we have set up an 'expert escalation' rota so they always have someone to ask for a quick response if they aren't sure. Jess, who runs the Customer Support team, is discussing with the team other ways we might be able to provide more certainty and continuity for our customers next week in order to agree further next steps.
Thank you again for your patience and forbearance and for being so generous as to explain the details of your feedback to me on the phone. It has helped us with an action plan I'm confident is going to remove the issues you experienced for other customers in future, and I am extremely grateful to you for that.
Please let me know if you have any further questions or comments. . . . Thank you Cat (Jones)
