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Technical problems have been frustrating for all concerned
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From Simon Edsall, managing director, Condor Ferries.
AS we have made public, we experienced a number of technical problems with all three of our fast craft recently. Unfortunately, this all happened during the busiest time of the year and I apologise for the inconvenience this caused to our customers.
This has been a hugely frustrating time for all concerned but we have worked hard to try to minimise the impact of the schedule changes for example by swapping vessels over between the routes.
Unfortunately there is never an easy answer during periods of disruption and ports can become busier than normal as the resulting delays mean departure times coincide.
Generally we are very successful in contacting passengers, particularly using SMS text messages, informing them of delays so I am sorry that this customer appears not to have been contacted. We are now looking at ways to reduce the likelihood of these technical problems reoccurring next year.
Our web booking system has been operating normally but we recognise it is not as user friendly as we would like. To that end, we are currently working on a project with our third party system designers to offer ‘best fare’ functionality.
This will make it much easier for our customers to find the fares that suit them best. In the past year, we have introduced cheaper durational fares for those that are travelling for periods of up to two and a half days, five days or ten days. All our sailings have a minimum 10 per cent allocation of these fares and they have been incredibly popular. The best advice is therefore to book as early as possible and on those sailings that tend to be less in demand.
We have adjusted our schedules to St Malo from Jersey on some Fridays during the winter season. This has been done primarily to ensure we don’t have arrival times either in St Malo or for the UK bound ship that are late in the evening.
Customer feedback indicates that many of our passengers find an arrival time of approximately 8.30 pm in St Malo or 10.30 pm in Weymouth to be too late to allow them a comfortable drive in the dark to their final destination if they are not staying in the immediate environs of the port.
Historically, we have also carried twice as many cars and many more passengers on the lunchtime sailings to France than the evening departure. We have therefore tried to optimise the schedule by timetabling a mid-afternoon departure on a Friday during the winter months that should serve to benefit the majority of our customers. We appreciate that for some of our customers a later departure is more desirable so we are currently hoping to be able to defer the timing by an hour and a half in light of feedback.
Condor Ferries is dedicated to providing a lifeline service and improving the experience it offers to its customers. We don’t get it right all of the time but the consolidation of the fuel surcharge, the introduction of the durational fares, the purchase of the much larger Condor Rapide in place of Condor ten and the efforts of all our staff during the volcanic ash incident to get thousands of travellers to their final destination are all examples of steps in the right direction.
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