Aircoach Dublin-Cork express

are you referring to the pm bus or the 8pm bus in relation to the one Kilkenny person and the not stopping?

This is a most bizzare incident. What baffles me is how the driver of the service they came up on stopped in Urlingford to pick them up and sell them tickets! I dont think it is the fault of Aircoach itself to be fair.

It is unacceptable to expect customers to wait an extra hour. With BE, even if there is just one person who cannot be accomadated on the bus, an extra bus is provided. All passengers going the full length to Cork/Dublin will be put on one bus and this will run non stop. It is well and good to say there is great flexibility with Aircoach, but IE and BE will never turn a passenger away on an Intercity service.

The service overall seems to be pulling good loads, I noted several buses on Friday and they were all nicely filled. Having said that the 07:30 train was standing room only, 370 odd in standard class and a nicely filled CityGold. The BE service is definately quieter, but I think that is because of the disasterous running time of the new X8. It usually arrives in Cork about 50 minutes late, making it only 5 minutes faster then the old service!

And this is exactly what I was pointing out previously, after all the clamour for the toilets on the vehicles, now we are having moaning because the toilets are too smelly and are meaning that there is less leg-room on the vehicles that feature them, unfortunately that is always a trade off with a toilet, especially a floor level one. With the toilet being on the same level of seats there is always going to be a bigger chance of a smell travelling the length of a bus, and that is why a sunken toilet, whilst less accessible, is better from this point of view.

A floor level toilet also takes up around four seats on a vehicle which means less passengers can be carried, which is especially relevant on a two axle coach as it can reduce the capacity to a stage where ideally the vehicle doesn't carry as many passengers as it needs to really and this means a lot of the time there has to be compromises made with the spec of the bus to some degree.

The Aircoach new vehicle spec has always been the blue and orange seats you refer to, with lots of legroom. However without a toilet these are seating 44 on a two axle coach and 51/53 on a three axle coach. Leaving aside the greater fuel consumption of a three axle coach, if you add a toilet in they are going to seat approx 40 and 47 respectively, which really isn't a fantastic amount of people at the end of the day. That is why you rarely see lots of legroom and a toilet specified on the same coach. Aircoach was always regarded as the biggest leg-room o their new vehicles than any other operator.

However there is a historic context to this you need to bear in mind why we are seeing this compromised solution which I will outline below, which is related to the fleet procurement policies and the recession which has influenced the situation that Aircoach now find themselves in, and there is no simple solutions and they are not in the best of positions as a business at the moment so they are limited at what they can do with regards to the vehicles they have at their disposal.

Cast your mind back to 2007. Aircoach business on it's Dublin area routes is booming, 2003/2004 44 seat high end luxury huge legroom Setra's are running close to capacity, the 2003 ones are suffering from chronic gearbox issues. The Irish economy is still in a good state. The company is making good profits for it's fourth year in a row. Aircoach decide that they need to serve the passengers they are leaving behind. They order 53 seat tri-axle coaches to serve that demand of a very similar spec to the Setra's. At this point non stop intercity services do not exist, and the City run are short enough not to need toilets.

The coaches on a multi-year lease get delayed and do not arrive until 2008/2009, at which time the Irish economy is caving in demand is going down at a rapid rate and traffic at Dublin airport is dropping. The vehicles that have now arrived are not needed as the capacity is way in excess of the now much reduced demand, but they become a cost that has to be paid as the lease has been signed. Aircoach are left with high capacity coaches, which are not ideally suited to intercity work due to their lack of toilets. But have them for several years they do and they have to make do with them. They then need to adjust their business model to look at Intercity work, seeing as the airport routes are barely making any money.

However at this point the company is loss making, has expensive lease rental payments it is contracted to pay on vehicles which are not reaching their potential and are too expensive because of the lack of demand on airport routes, and the lack of toilets for intercity routes, but they have to stick to the contracts they signed. As money is tight, leasing extra coaches in a business that is losing a good amount of money in the last 12 months is simply not an option at present I'd assume they believe. So therefore they ask their parent company in the UK, what can you offer us, and they are offered the best coaches that the UK have spare, at no cost to them as they are owned by the group.

What I would expect to see is when the leases come up on the Setra's or the Jonckheere's they will asses the market to see what they can secure as replacements. I'm sure with the benefit of hindsight they would have specified the Jonckheere's with toilets, and if the Irish economy had not gone into recession, the fleet would have had an order for Intercity coaches with toilets at some point because all of the other assets would have been running at high frequencies on routes which have been cut back. Sadly those assets are spare because the demand isn't there, so we end with half baked solutions.

The difference with GoBus is that they have little liabilities, and less risk in their business as it is not so dependent on airport travel, or short routes, so they've only ever needed one type of coach and passenger but Aircoach very much is a business that is geared up for Airport travel that is trying to now compete in the intercity market, despite the fact the fleet is not ideally suited to this, but they still have a large fleet which is on multi year leases which is being asked to do jobs that were never really intended of it. GoBus started from scratch during the recession and this was of benefit. Note Citylink originally had no toilets on board their coaches and were only able to replace them once the leases on the Scania's ran out.