The Airlink routes ran very successfully for a number of years and effectively was able to pitch itself as something between a normal bus and express coach, being a euro or two cheaper than the coach, whilst also accepting Dublin Bus tickets and serving bus and rail stations which Aircoach did not do.
What happened there was that at the time Covid hit, National Express had just entered the fray (at that point with only three stops) and the Dublin Bus Airlink Fleet was approaching 12 years old and needed replacing and Dublin Bus probably conceded that after Covid and demand taking it's time to pick up again, it wasn't commercially viable to purchase new specialist vehicles for the airport run on the basis the market was now crowded and would require substantial investment and would lead to diminishing returns for what was a non core operation.
At that point NX were running two buses an hour to the city centre and Aircoach were running at least four an hour through NX were especially commercially canny in that as soon as Dublin Bus stopped operating their services, they applied to amend their services to serve the stops that no longer had an express bus service, including the lucrative stops at bus and rail stations that were exclusive to Dublin Bus. They also heavily marketed their services post covid and built up a network of resellers across Dublin whilst Aircoach were quite passive in comparison.
We're currently at the following frequencies through the city centre, with most routes pretty much operating 24 hours a day apart from around 01:00am to 03:30am. Aircoach does still serve some unique areas on the 700, but obviously the city centre market is where all the money is.
Aircoach
700 2x Hour (To Leopardstown via Dublin City Centre)
700X 2x hour (To City Centre)
The 700X despite it's name is not an express version of the 700, it's just a short working of the 700 (that used to be every 15 minutes) that omits all but the nearest three stops to the airport. It is likely this route that is going to get the double decks. It also now has limited hours of operation with the last service to the airport at 5.30pm and last service from the airport at 8.30pm. It's late starting at first ex city centre departure at 6:42am.
Dublin Express
782 4x per hour (To Connolly Station via CIty Centre and Heuston Station)
783 2x per hour (To Terenure Via City Centre and Harcourt and Rathmines LUAS)
784 2x per hour (Via Docklands to City Centre)
Not all of those services will serve the same stops, but a few of the stops will have two a more services that depart from them and the Custom House Quay stop for Connolly Station and Busaras has all three services stopping at them and obviously for those going to the city centre it dwarves Aircoach for frequency, especially in the hours when the 700X is not running.
They will generally allow two operators on a corridor but generally won't allow them to act in any way that could be seen predatory. For example, if Aircoach and Dublin Express want to service a certain area, it may be that one of them has to service a road around the corner from each other and/or must be time separated from each other. IE generally if you get an intercity route with two operators that run every hour, the NTA will ask for them to be separated by 30 minutes. The idea is to stop bus wars and people pulling up at each others stops 5 minutes ahead of each other to take their passengers.
The service that is being talked about as getting the ex Glasgow is essentially short working of the original 700 route that already exists that is being converted in to a bus route (apparently to have dual Aircoach and First Bus branding, if that makes any sense at all) on the basis to fight back against NX who have gone from being a new entrant to the dominant operator on the route.
I do happen to think it may be a case of after the horse has bolted however, especially when Aircoach got a fair bit of bad publicity for last years botched network which led to
industrial relations issues,
service unreliability and a substantial number of cancellations and the collapse of customer demand and satisfaction for the long standing route to Greystones which for some odd reason was merged with another route which
created a huge unwieldy, slow unattractive route that went around the world which then
unsurprisingly Aircoach cancelled because it no longer commercially worked. Many of the changes were reverted back, all be it with the 700 at half the frequency it used to be before the failed network review and the 700X essentially replacing the other 700 journeys, all be it with a truncated route and much shorter operating hours.
