Dublin Airport Bus Service Changes

Aircoach Update

• On the subject of Aircoach, they've had vehicles around south Dublin a fair bit recently doing what appears to be test runs for possible changes to their 700/702/703 routes. For several days it was the same time every day that they were doing loops of various places so it suggests some changes may well be on the cards in the future.
  
  
• Aircoach have also relaunched the coach tracker, but I cannot say the UI is great. All it does is allow you to pick the scheduled time of your departure from your stop and then shows you where all the coaches are on that route on a map. Even when you click a coach on the map it only shows the time that coach was due to leave the terminus and there is no functionality to give an ETA of when the coach might arrive. Being able to see them on the map is helpful, but for a tourist it really would be helpful to show an estimated time. Considering how long it's been down for, it's disappointing.
  
  
• Student tickets are no longer available on the 704X/705X. However the way they've gone about this is really poor. If you select a student rather than an adult on the booking system and select a to/from point on these routes, it simply tells you no services are found. Which makes it look like no tickets are available. Surely it's not too hard to simply do what they do on the 700, which is not even allow a student ticket to be selected on the home page?

For several days in a row there was the same vehicle at the same times seemingly without passengers on seemingly not stopping anywhere before returning to the airport which makes it certainly look like it was testing a route change.

It was unclear if it was testing a single route or multiple changes to multiple routes, as it appeared to spend the mornings operating to/from Ballybrack via Dalkey via a very similar route but then the afternoon going from Cherrywood via the N11 and R138 to Dublin Airport and operating in both directions.

I have heard some people say it was a private hire service and not a route test, but the things that would be unusual about that is it was always an early 2014 coach doing the run (very odd to use your oldest coaches on private hires) and for a private hire it seemed to be covering an awful lot of ground multiple times a day backwards and forwards and constantly on the go.

Could be totally wrong but it indeed looked like a route test.

There's technically 4 Bendy Citaros that Aircoach still have on their license, the rest have been formally de-licensed and withdrawn. How many are actually in service on your average day though, I couldn't tell you. It could well be that not all four remaining are currently in service.

Routes

This really sounds in part as a return to something similar to what has happened in the past on the network, since originally the Ballsbridge route (which had the 701 designation but it was never used) ran alongside the 700, before the 701 was merged into the 702 and then later the 703, which first went via the East Link

Are there any areas being unserved going foward that currently are? The route tests that I have seen didn't seem to involve some of the parts of the 700 route around the current stops in Sandyford or Leopardstown or Killiney, but maybe they were not testing those parts or were doing so on other runs that I didn't see.

Vehicles

Putting higher spec double deckers like they have on the Stansted Airlink in the UK on the 700 during a driver shortage when they are leaving passengers behind on a regular basis and couldn't achieve a consistent frequency they wanted because of a lack of drivers on the 700 is a very sensible move in terms of yields, customer satisfaction and circumventing the driver shortage and one I've been advocating on here for the last 12-18 months, without directly coming out and saying it..

This should allow them to undercut Dublin Express on price a little bit as well as they will be able to pitch their service between a premium coach service (on the corridor where they have been seriously outmanoeuvred commercially by DX) and a normal city bus service, basically the same kind of way that Dublin Bus did with Airlink.

In terms of the Irizar vehicles, do we know what kind of spec they are going to go for? When I heard about them buying Tourismos I was really looking forward to them entering service, but the interior of them meant for me they were disappointing as they were even more high density than the Panthers. A shame because the Tourismo is a much better coach overall, but has been let down by poor spec choices.

Some common sense at last on the Tourismos.

It doesn't speak an awful lot about the people who signed them off though, but we've had the conversation about the company, it's recent senior management hires and their lack of experience in industry and in Ireland and the differences between bus and coach services plenty of times before. You think a professional is expensive, you wait until you try an amateur, etc.

Lets be fair though, it seems that there will be a fair amount of changes between now and the end of the year, so hopefully they are able to turn it around. The business has a lot of potential and if it's run in the right way and the commercial team up their game and make the right decisions it's not a total lost cause. But they HAVE to get it right this time or it really will be time for First to sell-up to someone who will run it better.

At the end of the day it is up to Aircoach if they want to try and complete with others or just put the same mediocre effort as over the past few years which has seen their position erode on the Dublin Airport to Dublin City corridor, the Dublin to Cork and Dublin to Belfast corridor. They've been schooled by far more commercially savvy competitors who are willing to put the hard yards in and be aggressive in the marketplace whilst Aircoach has been cent wise and Euro foolish for a considerable length of time.

Considering the large amount wasted on the Galway/Derry corridors and the Mercs, nothing more would underline the poor management of the company recently than skimping on the comparatively small costs of converting the 700. They need to make it an attractive proposition that offers something over and above the experience that you can get on the PSO network for it to succeed if they are going to be charging a price that is a fair bit higher.

On the subject of triaxles, you can't just look at it in terms of fuel. You need to look at it that it allows you to carry extra passengers per coach, which is helpful during a driver shortage and potentially provide a better onboard experience. What we have now is a dogs dinner of a spec, where Aircoach have gone from a 13.4m triaxle Jonckheere JHV with 53 seats to a 12.3m Tourismo with 55 seats which the marketing teams at Dublin Express and GoBus have spent the last 12-18 months exploiting by shouting from the rooftops how they are running ultra premium, spacious coaches and have been busy taking market share from Aircoach, who once upon a time, were known as the most premium operator out there.

As someone who has worked in a company where the customer care team has been outsourced to the UK, let me tell you this. It doesn't work from anything else other then a cost point of view. You lose the local knowledge, which is important when you are dealing with tourists and people who are travelling to the airport. Having that local knowledge is one of very few areas where Aircoach has been superior to DX over the last year or two. What you end up getting is people sending replies based on their knowledge of the UK which don't really apply to Ireland but they don't know the differences between the country. I am sure that the cost savings involved in this will be significant and are the key driving factor of doing so, however the company wants to spin it.