21.01.12 – My final 4tours.biz blog!

First of all (as usual!), apologies for the lack of blogs lately but as you can probably imagine things have been rather hectic as we have been working very closely with martins on the handover of the business. Martins have ran some private tours already and are going to bravely start a limited tour programme from next weekend, needless to say, we wish them every success. As from about the middle of next week I will hand over the admin of the site to Noelle and William Martin and hopefully our new site www.signaturetours.ie will be up and running soon so if you enjoy my blogs keep a look out, also don’t forget my homepage at blogger.com (http://barrattexec.blogspot.com/) I will continue to post news on there as it happens. Our last tours back in December really did mark the end of an era for us and it is hard to adjust to giving up our baby, you know what is happening to our business but what about our vehicles? Well I shall now reveal all in order of age: Celtic Spirit – Our original bus is staying with me and Chris and has recently been resurrected for a trip to UK hopefully next weekend where it is to have an obscene amount of money lavished on it to make it as good as new and ready for our forthcoming nostalgia tours. Celtic Princess – Our faithful minibus is again staying with us but is now no longer a bus, it is undergoing a conversion to our very own camper which will help us to travel during the summer a little and indeed our first festival is booked for August! Celtic Pride – Now up for sale and honestly will be a fantastic buy for anyone – contact us if you are interested! Celtic Shadow - Will remain to be our car and will be available for chauffer tours under our new company. Celtic Star – Is to be the main vehicle operating Barratt Tours as it has been sold to Martins – they had better mind my friend Rambo! Celtic Angel –Our new coach is to be the backbone of our new Signature tours – look out for them! So major changes and a bit of a scary time but we are both feeling good about the new found freedom that we will have particularly in the summer months. Finally as this is really my last official Barratt Tours blog I would just like to thank everyone that has made Barratt Tours what it is today and I will do my best to thank you all in order: My partner in life and business – There would be no Barratt Tours to sell without the help of one very special person – Christine, she has been a rock to me as well as other driver, cleaner etc etc. I think we have made a fantastic team and her exploits and qualities are too many to mention here but suffice to say she deserves far more than half the credit for our success. Our passengers - nobody is more important than all the lovely people we have met over the years that have really made our job a pleasure. At the lowest times it has always given me a boost to hear words of encouragement from appreciative people who choose our tours and one of the greatest buzzes for me is when I hear things like” I did this tour with you in 1998” or similar – I will really miss that! Our friends in the trade – There really are too many to name without running the risk of forgetting somebody, so you all know who you are both fellow day tour operators and coach operators – it has been an honour and a privilege to work with some of you lovely people and the feeling of “belonging” has made the journey very special to me and Chris. Our competitors – from the (mostly!) friendly rivalry between us and our fellow rail tour operator (hi Jim) to the crazy and blatant copying of other lower quality operators I suppose this has been a vital ingredient of the wild 14 years of our Barratt Tours journey, one thing I hope is that you will all be rewarded with the amount of success appropriate to the amount of commitment, imagination and integrity that you have (if that is true it don’t look well for some, ha ha!) The last thing I would like to say is that we wish Martins all the luck in the world with Barratt Tours and I hope that we have given you a firm foundation to build on, indeed I hope you will make one of my visions come true – I want to see a brand new Van Hool TX in full Barratt Tours livery – go on, I know you can do it!