Naked Bus Breakdown Nightmare
When the cabin of a Naked Bus was overwhelmed with fumes during a recent trip in the early hours of the morning, the maintenance practices of the bus operator immediately came into question. The bus was travelling from Wellington to Auckland in New Zealand.
To make things worse after two hours of waiting in the chilly conditions, the bus that did pick up the passengers blew a tire shortly after. This had the disgruntled passengers questioning the service provided by the operator.
When questioned on their maintenance practices, Naked Bus guaranteed that they had an effective preventative maintenance program in place. The fact that their replacement, turned up and had its own dramas is a coincidence that they just didn’t need at the time.
When operating any piece of equipment, we all know that it will have its fair share of issues throughout its lifetime. The most you can do from a maintenance perspective is ensure that it is maintained to the highest standard. Making sure that all work is captured and preventative maintenance schedules are comprehensively set up and carried out. In the case where they do fail, you have a complete Job history to work with and also have this information readily available as insurance.
Don’t just stop there - complement the maintenance done, by being vigilant and taking more responsibility towards your maintenance and the service you provide. MEX GM Steve Ninnes touched on this in more details in the recent article: Saving Money in Fleet Maintenance by 10%
Where doing Preventative Maintenance, being vigilant and taking more responsibility towards your maintenance practices will not only help in curbing maintenance costs, it will improve the quality of your service.
At the end of the day you are providing a service, so make sure it is carried out in a way that ensures you have return clients. Implement an effective PM program, improve your response times for breakdowns, alert all operators and clients of issues and outage times and provide fully operational replacements, etc…
So if you ever find yourself in the situation like Naked Bus, your disgruntled passengers will be looked after, stay well informed of any developments or further issues and most of all understand exactly what went wrong.
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