Sunday, July 11, 2010

SNCF and an example of service

I actually have no time for blogging now, as I’m at Reims Forum journoing and writing some semi serious stuff on a damn complicated French keyboard :), but if I refrain from putting down memories now then the details of this trip will slip from my mind. So, what was so special in this totally random route? Due to the reason that I started my trip from a God's forgotten place in one country and ended up in another, but in the meantime I accidentally passed through cities which I could never ever imagine to get in the list of my visited places. But the thing what I would like to draw attention is SNCF.
French National Railway Corporation which amazed me with its service even though I was two hours late on the venue and despite the fact that I ended up with relatively uncomfortable trip with hell of a hot bus without air condition (wherein I spent 1,5 hours instead of 30 minutes comfortable trip with TGV). So, the case was that, due to some technical problems my 11th train in a day stopped in a totally random French city and the passengers were allocated to the bus which was certainly late on the schedule. Quite normally I was angry and my irritation was rising as time passed. I should mention that French people (at least out of Paris) were amazingly friendly and as they figured out I was a tourist with insufficient knowledge of French they started helping me out with advices and were trying to calm me down, even though I was really enjoying the views of central France and didn’t care that much about the train fuck up.
What has happened finally was that the bus stopped on another train station and the staff of SNCF brought us boxes of water and food, which was totally unexpected for everyone. Apart from this, they have sent taxis for each and every passenger, in order to get them to their places of destination. Hence, I got mine as well from Loan to Reims which was basically 50 kms and I presume it should have cost me at least 50 Euros. 
I don’t know the price of thisimage maintainance” act, but the fact that they respected passengers to that extent was indeed a nice gesture from SNCF.
I had uncountable fuck ups during my travel history, have been late on couple of planes (once even missed it), not to mention busses which I missed quite many times, but the level of respect towards customers was the highest ever experienced.

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