Terravision – Victoria Bus Station

Very cheap compared to other transport options to Stansted (9 euro each) but the location is hard to find outside Victoria. There are no signs posted and we had to use our phone gps and ask several people to find the location next to Megabus on Bulleit St. Leave extra time for this part– the bus leaves right on time! Everything else was stellar.

Most hidden spot to buy a ticket.
It’s in a desk inside the TerraCafe. And it’s not inside the Victoria coach station. It’s based in a mall in front of the coaches stops.

By, Woohoo! As good as it gets!, I mean it’s cheap, you get a tour of the Thames while leaving the city, the location is convenient, and they will gladly exchange your tickets with a smile if you miss your bus. The coaches are comfortable and reasonably clean. It’s a good option for me too as I have a small child and I can let her play and move around a bit in her seat.
A return ticket cost me 16 pounds.

When I first saw these guys approaching me in the airport with a brochure I thought they were scam artists. Silly me. They have since rescued me on several occasions from the more remote airports. It’s pretty basic service but it might be your only option. I’ve never booked in advance. The times I’ve used Terravision have been more like «oh look, a coach, lets get on it.»

How do you evaluate a company that provides a shuttle service from a station to an airport? There are probably pretty important things, such as how frequent is the service, how precise the respect of schedules for the buses and how clean are the coaches.
From this point of view terravision is a decent company.
That said, it’s when things go wrong, that you really get to know a transportation company, and from this point of view I’ve experienced something really unpleasant that makes it so that, despite using Terravision services a number of times in the past (I’m Italian and I fly home about once per month), I won’t do that anymore.
A few weeks ago my girlfriend planned to go to the Stansted airport through Terravision. We didn’t think about booking the service, so when we got to the stop and saw a mass of people we realized that getting on the bus was unlikely.
That said, we discovered that day that booking wouldn’t have helped. A very rude ticket collector showed at the stop and started letting people on the bus around 5 minutes before the start.
After a while, the bus got full, and a few people were left off, even having a reservation: when they complained, the guy dismissed them quickly (and very rudely) saying «keep calm, look at your tickets: they clearly state that the reservation is worth until 15 minutes before the leaving time».
So, in order to be sure you get on the bus, you must be there 15 minutes earlier, fair enough: but the guy didn’t show up until 5 minutes earlier!
Also, he let all the people put baggages on the bus, before some of them could realize they wouldn’t get it: they then had to dig their luggage under a mountain of other stuff, completely unhelped.
We had also heard the guy (who was italian) answering in Italian «it’s none of my business» when someone told him «why are you letting all these people putting baggages in if you’re not sure they’ll fit on the bus?».
The thing does not end here: the Terravision FAQ on their site states: «If the bus you had to take is already ful, do not worry, another bus is already ready to take you to your destination!». The wording was different when this incident happened, and stated something more explicit like «we have a large number of buses ready to be used in this case so that none of our passengers is left off», but is still misleading: there was absolutely no bus «already ready to take you to your destination», unless the next bus that was scheduled 30 minutes later was considered «ready».
We finally decided to run at the near Victoria Bus Station where a National Express coach was due a few minutes later: the driver saw my girlfriend running, he waited for her, he came down and helped her place her luggage, and gave her a seat in a half-​empty bus: for £1 more we decided that would be our choice from next time on.