Aircoach knock BE out of the water between Dublin and Cork because BE still serve the intermediate towns and Aircoach don't.
Aircoach were always the most pro-active and customer focused operator on that route, even before they started the express services in April 2012 and abandoned the Towns in June 2012, The Bus Eireann route to Cork, like a lot of routes on the Expressway network, it suffered from a lack of service development over many years, way before the motorways were even finished being built, let alone people starting non stop services.
Before any non-stop services started on Dublin to Cork and any pulling out fo Towns:
Bus Eireann:
- Operated six services a day between Dublin City and Cork
- Services from Dublin/Cork at 8am/10am/12pm/2pm/4pm/6pm
- Didn't serve Dublin Airport.
- Didn't offer Wifi
- Had a 40 minute break mid journey
- Took 4hr 20 mins.
Aircoach
- Operated eight services a day between Dublin Airport and Cork
- Services from Dublin at: 7am/9am/11am/1pm/3pm/5pm/7pm/8pm
- Services from Cork at: 1am/7am/9am/11am/1pm/3pm/5pm/7pm
- Served Dublin Airport
- Offered Wifi
- Had a 15 minute break mid journey
- Took 3hr 50 mins
The simple fact is that offering six services a day between the two biggest cities in the country wasn't serving the passengers well, the fact that Bus Eireann simply sat on the same timetable for about 6-7 years without a change is exactly why private operators are badly needed in Ireland, because time and time again it has been shown that the only time they change their commercially run services appears to be when someone else does.
You claim that BE cannot drop any Town's but they have done exactly that, a few weeks after Aircoach launching their express runs they dropped half of the Town's on their route and reducing running time by a huge amount which all the people in the industry knew was not possible. Bus Eireann were forced into climbdown a short while later when they had to recast the timetable by adding 20 minutes to the running time with no change of routing.
Until recently Aircoach were operating 36 services a day on the Dublin to Cork corridor and were still requiring reliefs on a regular basis to the point where last month they increased it to 41 services a day and still are requiring reliefs because they are providing services which people want, which is after all what public transport is all about.
I can tell you that when there were 14 services a day in each direction servicing all of the mostly small towns on average 80% of the traffic was Dublin to Cork and 20% was to or from the small towns. It was only the Dublin to Cork passengers that made that level of service to the mostly small towns viable in the first place. Certainly the small towns still need a service, but when the motorway was finished and the Dublin to Cork passengers were gone, this never was going to be sustainable.