Aircoach are to withdraw the following routes from 8th April
- 706 - Dublin Airport - Dublin - Maynooth - Athlone - Ballinasloe - Galway
- 706x - Dublin Airport - Dublin - Athlone - Galway
They have been unable to gain a foothold in the corridor, thanks in part to the merger of Irish CityLink and GoBus.ie some while ago, who were by far the two dominant operators on the corridor, who steadily increased services to up to four buses an hour between Galway and Dublin on their various variations making it almost impossible for anyone else to compete.
CityLink have been very careful on the corridor in that they have continued to run non stop CityLink and GoBus services between Dublin and Galway under two separate licenses and brands, liveries and Ltd companies despite sharing tickets, websites and trading addresses, so technically have both non-stop licenses between Dublin and Galway despite being technically in the same ownership.
However there is some stupidity in that the only reason that the competition committee in Ireland cleared the merger was that Aircoach had agreed to start their low frequency service and some may say that that was an awful commercial move by Aircoach, since if they hadn't have agreed to do that, the merger would have most likely been conditional on one of the now merged operations foregoing their license on the corridor and making it available to someone else. In the end, CityLink got what they wanted, their biggest competitor on the corridor acquired, a very dominant position and a very weak competitor who were never going to be able to compete.
The other thing is that the way Aircoach went about this announcement was very anti-passenger. On Wednesday they contacted all the pre-booked passengers for Thursday that the services were not running for operational reasons. To allow a meeting to take place on the Thursday with effected staff, they chose to cancel the entire schedule of the 706/706x for the day. However no notice was posted on their website or on social media. This meant that walk up passengers, or those free pass holders, were left waiting by the roadside with no idea services were not running.
This comes on the back of a worrying trend for the operation, where over the last few months the coach tracker has not been on the Aircoach site and they are no longer posting cancellations on social media and there has been a real issue with lack of transparency about the reliability, punctuality of services and service cancellations, which has clearly now hit a new low.
www.route-one.net
