irish ferries

ednwireland wrote: »

Went to book that for a weekend in North Wales end of Jan and irish ferries had no sailings.

Odd when a company thinks not running any services is the best option.

There appear to be sailings on line now, but it's only in the last few days that they have been loaded in to the system, up until the 9th, there was no information after Jan 6th. I suspect that the ongoing delays to the delivery of the WB Yeats have caused massive issues with scheduling, as all of the ships are dry docked in the first few months of the year, they start with Ulysses, and then there are other moves as the fleet is swapped around to cover.


In theory, WB Yeats should have been well established at this stage, and available to provide cover for the maintenance windows, but they are clearly not about to risk the costs and bad PR of cancelling yet more sailings, which makes sense given that they have not yet taken delivery of the ship, and there's no knowing how it will perform once in service, the Irish Sea is a hostile piece of water in the winter months, and they've not had chance to practice their docking procedures during the quieter periods of the year, and they will be doing shake down during the worst possible weather conditions, which may be causing some concerns.

The problem is a missing ferry that was supposed to have been in service some 6 months ago, but has yet to be delivered, and the early months of the year are the maintenance window, which means an even bigger issue for services, there is a shortage of suitable ships to charter to fill the gaps, and one of the existing ferries (Epsilon) was meant to be ending the charter now, so that leaves an even bigger hole in the schedules.

The other issue is that the weather during the winter period for the France route means that there are problems using smaller ships on that route, whatever about having to cancel because of weather, it's even more of a problem if the ship sails and then runs into weather that results in damage to vehicles during the crossing, which has happened with Epsilon.

From a PR point of view, the deafening silence from Irish Ferries has not done them any favours, it has been incredibly badly managed, but the delay in the delivery of the WB Yeats has also hurt them and the supplier, it was only a few weeks ago that a very limited schedule for the Holyhead Dublin route was uploaded for the Jan to April period, and there are a lot of holes in that schedule compared to what was being expected.

There have also been significant reliability issues with Ulysses, which up until this year has been incredibly reliable, but there have been several periods of problems that have caused even more disruption that would be normal, and the fast ferry is out of service this year, partly because of weather problems, but also to allow for updates and repairs that have been found to be needed.

I suspect that right now, Irish Ferries is not a happy place to be working, due to the number of problems that have happened in a relatively short period of time.