Today we travelled to Pompei to see the excavations. Cameron will be giving you an update on the site, whereas I will be giving you a critical evaluation of the Eurostar service. For free, I will provide the abstract of an artical comparing the tourist buses we have caught in different cities.
(Anyone suggesting that I am lacking intellectual stimulation will be ritually flayed before being defenestrated).
Eurostar
Because I am hopeless in the mornings, we ended up on the more expensive Eurostar service to Napoli. This wasn't an issue, but it was a slightly higher expense. However, this was the best train I have ever been on. Firstly, it didn't stop between Rome and Napoli. Secondly, it went fast. Third, it was empty, and for a full hour and a half Cameron and I enjoyed the silence we didn't realise we had been missing since arriving in Roma.
Then we transfered to the Circumvestuviana, to get to the Pompei site. Their trains were not nice. Neither were their platforms. But they did get us to the site which was all they needed to do.
Our return trip presented us with the choice between two first class train options; one we would have had to fun for, and the other being another Eurostar journey. Again, we enjoyed the quiet, peaceful trip as night fell. So warm, so pleasant. I understand why trains can be considered the royalty of travel. I look forward to longer trips on the Eurostar when I return to Italy.
A critcal evaluation of tourist bus services: An Australian perspective from the shoulder season.
This short piece evaluates three tourist bus services: the Barcelona Bus Touristic; the Rome Sightseeing Bus and the Rome Archeobus. All three services were used within a 6 week period of 2007. The three services are rated on ease of ticket purchase, frequency of services, quality of audio commentery and route coverage.
The services were selected because of their popularity, and the inclusion of two services from the same city allows within-study triangulation. In addition, two services of the same franchise (the Barcelona and Rome Sightseeing Bus) were investigated and will be contrasted. Limitations in the study include the low number of bus services sampled, and that all services are offered in the Western European region. Despite these constraints, the author believes they lay a solid foundation for future research into tourist bus services.
The study concludes that the quality of the bus service relies in part on its level of patronage, but also relies heavily on the operator's willingness to continue to innovate in service delivery. Overall, the Barcelona service is the clear winner of the three options, as both Rome options have serious limitations in the quality of audio delivery and frequency of services.
1 comment:
We took the sight seeing buses all over Europe, the one in Florence in particular was fantastic, and I found no amount of wanker tourists could ruin the experienc so long as you had good enough headphones and a willingness to ignore everything not outside the window.
Personally I always consider the cost of the Eurostar tickets to be worth it; especially if you're going through big towns. I don't catch anythign else anymore.
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