National Express Coventry

National Express Coventry is the current trading name and brand name of West Midlands Travel Ltd (part of the National Express Group), a company which operates bus services from its depot in the city of Coventry in the West Midlands region of England. All of West Midlands Travel Ltd other bus depots in the West Midlands operate under the name National Express West Midlands. National Express Coventry previously operated under the trading names of Travel Coventry, Travel West Midlands and West Midlands Travel. The vast majority of the buses are still in Travel Coventry livery.

History

 * 26 October 1986 West Midlands Travel Ltd came into existence, and stems from the 1986 Bus deregulation of the bus industry in England and Wales. It was previously the bus operations of the West Midlands Passenger Transport Executive (WMPTE) which had originally been the separate operations of the Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Walsall, West Bromwich and Coventry Corporations.
 * April 1995 the company was purchased by the National Express Group.
 * September 1996 was re-branded to trade under the name Travel West Midlands.
 * 9 December 2002 the Coventry depot attained a more local identity and began trading as Travel Coventry.
 * 4 February 2008 National Express Coventry confirmed as the new name for Travel Coventry.

Travel Coventry Dissapears - National Express Group re-branding
Within the next few months National Express Coventry will be applying a temporary logo to several of its vehicles to highlight to those unaware the change from 'Travel Coventry' into 'National Express Coventry'.

The new livery will be applied to vehicles when they go in for maintenance. It is believed that National Express aim to have 1000+ vehicles in the livery by February 2009.

Fares
National Express Coventry offers two ways to pay for bus travel:
 * Pay on boarding - mainly for single fares and day tickets
 * Prepaid tickets - mainly passes which have various durations e.g - 1 week, 4 weeks or 52 weeks.

National Express Coventry operates an 'exact fare' policy on board buses, in coins only. Pay on boarding passengers must place their fare amount into a vault situated on the platform near to the drivers cab, who will then issue the relevant ticket. Drivers effectively do not handle cash nor give change, this is for speed and security reasons. If passengers do not have the correct coinage for their fare they can overpay but will not receive any change.

All routes (excluding route 12 within Warwickshire) have a simple single fare system - a journey of no more than 2 fare stages (about 2km) is £1.10 and any distance beyond that is £1.30. Children aged 5 to 15 are eligible for half rate single fares which are respectively 55p and 65p.

Also available is a multitude of day tickets, the most popular being an all day ticket named Coventry Daysaver, one can purchase this on their first National Express Coventry journey and it is valid for unlimited further journeys on any National Express Coventry bus service the same day (including the whole of route 12), priced at £2.60 for an adult, £1.75 for a child.

Senior citizens (aged 60 or over) and disabled persons who are resident in the seven metropolitan boroughs of the former West Midlands County Council area are eligible for a free concessionary travel pass issued by Network West Midlands and Network Coventry, it offers free multi-operator bus, rail and tram journeys throughout Coventry and the West Midlands county, weekday journeys must be started no earlier than 9.30am.

Reliability
National Express Coventry have been subject to many complaints over the reliability of some of their bus services. Complaints are frequently heard from students who claim that buses routinely just do not turn up when they are expected to.

National Express Coventry has become the target of critics regarding the reliability of certain services in Coventry. After major improvements and refreshment to the Coventry bus network in April 2006 and two months of extensive service monitoring, reliability checks and public feedback National Express Coventry has responded to the findings from these conducts and are making some minor changes in line with this to adjust the services, this will help improve the service quality they provide to their customers.