Firstly Mr Hand is recorded as being the sole director... He and his company are of interest to... regulatory authorities and others. He is ... under public scrutiny
I have the depressing feeling that Mr Hand does not appreciate the standard business world....Most businesses... need industry appreciation and local market knowledge... I think Mr Hand needs to learn a lot more about the industry he wishes to join...
It makes me sad that you have felt the need to embellish your comments with such patronising and high handed remarks. Everyone is entitled to ride on our buses and those of our competitors and form their own views, and sometimes those views will be favourable to us and sometimes favourable to our competitors, and we respect that and take criticism on board and seek to learn from it. Why therefore the need to make everything so personal? As far as I know, we’ve never met or discussed business strategy so while I do respect your right to travel on bus services and make a critique, I don’t understand what insight you feel you have into my level of understanding or awareness of the business world.
And just while I’m on my soapbox, I’m not sure I quite get the need for you and others to refer rather pompously to “Mr Hand”. The name’s Rhys. I don’t stand on ceremony, if anyone on this forum were stood next to me at the bar right now I’d gladly buy them a beer, so feel free to call me Rhys - unless you’d rather I call you Mr 13
In terms of the substance of your views, I’m a businessman and I take risks. Calculated risks, I hope, but no-one ever developed a successful business without taking risks. As with all my other ventures, we’ve gone into The One with eyes open, knowing that there’s no guarantee of success. But our local market knowledge told us that the frequency of buses between Newport and Bettws was too low for the size of the market, the service quality poor and the customer satisfaction low. In a deregulated market place that creates an opportunity. Time will tell if the opportunity is big enough, but we’re very happy with the results so far.
There is a slightly immature view of competition held by many industry observers (I don’t necessarily ascribe this view to you in particular, Richard) that success is defined as the other party going out of business, or being “run off the road”. In most retail markets, competitors coexist quite happily. If Persil launch a new brand of washing powder, clearly they’re hoping to gain market share, but nobody expects Ariel to go out of business as a result. Likewise, nowhere in our strategy is there an expectation that three vehicle FoxStar will put Newport Bus out of business. We simply see a commercial opportunity that we will exploit to the best of our ability, and leave it to them to respond as they see fit.
Would it have been our choice to run from Market Square? No, probably not originally. But we’re mature enough to realise that we can’t just turn up and expect the authorities to start moving long established services round just to make room for us. Friars Walk is busy and commercially attractive, but it’s also quite cramped and congested and nobody would have been well served by the daily spats over stand occupancy that have characterised competition in some other places. We therefore seek to maximise the positive benefits of having almost exclusive space at Market Square, and many of our customers prefer the calmer, more relaxed environment.
Your points about WiFi and ticketing are well made and these are areas that are under active development at the moment.
Finally, while I can appreciate that Market Square often doesn’t seem busy, I suspect if you’d lingered a while in Bettws itself, you would have seen a very healthy take up of our services there and that might have given you a view of our viability which is more in line with the reality.