The way we do buses in GB leaves a lot to be desired but that sounds even worse! Many thanks for the info
To be fair to the staff, whilst their claim is too high, the problem is that many of these staff have been working in the company for many years and the company itself has only had to deal with competition for the last 15 years or so, before then if a competitor wanted to operate a service it was pretty much tough luck, the company simply isn't used to working in a competitive landscape and obviously in a competitive market a previous monopoly is going to have to be run in a more cost effective manner when it has competitors.
The problem is the average wage bill in BE according to their accounts is just over 52,500 incl pension whereas the average wages in the bigger privates is around 38,000. First for instance pay a little above that with wages at about 39,300 on average for their ROI employees. However BE is unquestionably much heavier on management and has many more mid-grade managers than most companies would have in the UK for example, many of which has been in the company a long time.
You also have Bus Eireann who, as a sister company of Irish Rail under the same ownership group, refuse to target rail passengers whatsoever because of the common ownership. This was something a lot of the privates were able to exploit, as they would simply target everyone but BE were very cautious to avoid going after a modal switch from rail at all and in the case of some services went to great lengths to avoid doing so which is another factor which hasn't helped them.
It's also not been very commercially savvy At times BE Expressway is trying to serve every man and it's dog and bowing down to every community and protest group going believing it is the operator of the people, when in-fact it should simply be more ruthless with the commercial network and doing what it takes to get it performing to the highest possible levels. Unfortunately at times it's more concerned at the politics and trying to make sure it doesn't have a negative image than actually doing what is best for the company and that is a contributing factor of why it lands itself in the current situation.
Then you come to the amount they spend on marketing every year and new vehicles. They're running a fleet about half the age or less of a lot of their competitors, they've basically replaced the whole commercial fleet in the last 4 years at the cost of many tens of million on new vehicles, despite the fact they've made losses of several million every year in that time from their core operations, they continue to spent multiple millions a year advertising on TV and everywhere despite the fact the company claims to have no money they continue to simply spend with no control in these areas in the hope that marketing campaigns and new vehicles can cover the fact the services themselves are not competitive.
For me that is a terrible strategy particularly when the public are quite happy to stop using BE to use older vehicles on privates that start earlier, run later and are cheaper and offer faster journey times. The idea of investing money in these areas would be great if the public at large were willing to forego the nuts and the bolts of the service to sit in a newer vehicle, but they're not and they're simply ****ing money into the wind in my book and making a bad situation even worse.
The unions would like to portray this as the big bad privates who are depriving BE income that is rightfully theirs but one has to ask how BE, a company who was an incumbent and had a huge head start over all of the other privates, who had to start up from nothing to take on BE, could end up in a situation like this. Simply blaming the government for allowing competition might be politically convenient for the unions and their ideology, but it's far from the main cause of this.
There are many examples of routes, especially non stop ones between major cities, that BE claimed were "not viable" that privates have then gone in and made them pay and then BE have complained that their own services have suffered because of this as they then cannot get a license for the route because the two for that non stop route is already taken for a route that previously they did not feel one operator could make pay, but now feel three can?
If you are in a market where there is competition allowed, If you don't keep on innovating or improving things sooner or later, or taking risks to improve services you risk someone else doing it and taking your business away, that's pretty much what happened here. Management were caught asleep at the wheel and their lack of commercial acumen is directly to blame for this mess, if they had been more pro-active in managing the company and more ruthless in their decisions, I am sure the company would be in a much better financial position.