First day of the season today and I’am once again heading to the Cliffs with a fairly decent load, the same cannot be said of tomorrow or next week but I seem to remember I always get a healthy dose of paranoia at this time of year, hopefully things will look up soon.
I left you last time anticipating what promised to be an ‘interesting” trip to England because of the total close down of Irish Air space meaning we had to go by ferry, the plan was to take the car to Dublin then catch the evening fast ferry to Holyhead, spend the night there then take the train up to Sunderland. However we were just finishing packing on Sunday morning when we got a text from Stena Line kindly informing us that the ferry was cancelled due to technical failure – what to do now? We called Stena and were on hold for 50 min before being cut off – great! I then tried again and amazingly got talking to a human at last but they informed me the next foot passenger space was on Wednesday so that was not an option, there were however spaces on the night ferry for cars so we decided to take the car and drive to Sunderland then head back on the Friday by our favourite P & O crossing from Liverpool – sorted then!
All went reasonably to plan, it was along drive but helped by good roads and an even better car (still love the Mercedes!) and we did 260 miles in just over 4 hours (try and do that in Ireland!) We shared the driving and the trip passed in no time, the time with the family flew and I had a little business to attend to, we headed to Liverpool on Thursday night to catch the day sailing to Dublin, we had a great night in Liverpool which drew to a close what could only be described as an interesting winter!
We were inDublin this week delivering our brochures to Dublin Tourism and we were struck by the massive competition now on day tours to the Cliffs of Moher, there are now 4 operators offering totally coach based tours and 2 offering rail and coach tours (including ourselves!) As I think I have previously mentioned the coach tours are being heavily promoted and are carrying quite a lot of passengers indeed I often see them in Doolin all fighting for a bit of lunch at a certain establishment, thankfully we glide gracefully by to the haven of Gus O’Connors pub where a much more civilized atmosphere prevails! It amazes me how people are taken in by the idea that spending 12 hours on a coach is going to be fun and “mighty craic” when the journey could be made by rail in comfort with catering, toilets etc and the really interesting bit done by coach but it seems impossible for us to compete on price, commission rates paid to agents and general dirty tactics which we would never employ because, as I hope regular readers will know well - I’am proud to say our success has always been on our terms with clean hands, not all can claim that!
At this point this might be starting to sound like a rant against everyone in competition with ourselves but nothing could be further from the truth I have the greatest respect for some of our competitors and I like to think we have developed an understanding of each others operation and whilst we remain competitive we are always fair, what does surprise me is that our government is supporting and promoting these enterprises which only mean greater carbon emissions from coaches following each other across the country over routes that are more than adequately served by coach or train many of which have spare capacity, just my thoughts – what do you think?
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