Dublin Airport Bus Service Changes & Discussion

Do we know who is behind this venture?

What you say does not surprise me about the Aircoach Tourismos, this is excactly what I though they would be like.

The Tourismo is an excellent coach, however the spec that Aircoach have gone doesn't do it justice. They have literally gone for the basic choices everywhere in terms of the shortest length, poor USB placements, no curtains, the cheapest seat, the highest density, and little in the way of accessories on the seat. This combined with having a full wheelchair lift at the front of the coach (in isolation a good thing, but it just makes an already high density coach more high density as it takes up more room) means that the passenger onboard experience simply isn't good enough compared to what it should be.

There are now five base models of the Tourismo avaliable in the UK and Ireland, the entry level Tourismo Access, Tourismo,, Tourismo M, Tourismo M/2 and Tourismo L, and the Aircoach ones are likely to be at best the second but may even be the first. They are definately not the last three as they are too short and lack some of the obvious features that those coaches have. As you get later in the series they get bigger and longer and that is probably why you noticed the 9900 be such a big size, I believe it is somewhere close to the Tourismo L in size. The number of seats Aircoach put in is the highest Mercedes say they can physically put in a coach with a toilet.

In relation to the business model, unfortunatley this is an active choice that has been made. I've listened to a podcast with the outgoing MD a while back and she said then and in other media apperances and intervies that they were transitioning Aircoach away from 'Travel in Luxury and all that' to a hybrid operator that was focused on value add and good service at a great price. Essentially an admission that they have abandoned all kind of brand standards and decided to go down the cheapest possible route. I guess that is what happens when you bring several key appointments in from the UK industry more used to the bus industry who don't have the commercial and operational knowledge of the Irish market. It's been clear for some time that Aircoach have been treating Aircoach more like a UK Operating company and tried t orun it like one rather than address the specific needs.

I have to say that whilst the Dervla McKay era at Aircoach has brought some much needed focus on embracing and exploting modern technology, customer contact improvements and a vast improvement in marketing and online presence, along with some great work in the community and other groups, you can't overlook that the choice of vehicles and the commercial decisions made over the last few years have been poor for the most part and leave Aircoach vulnerable on all of the key corridors such as the 700, 704 and 705. The rebrand is also poor. The logo for me is nothing. Why couldn't they go and get Ray Stenning of Best Impressions to design something for them? His designs always pack a punch. Even the arrow on the Aircoach logo means nothing because it points in wrong place!

The other thing is are we sure that this is First penny pinching or bad local management? I honestly don't know, but go and have a look at the vehicles that they ordered for Railair. Scania coaches with good amount of legroom and tables and a much higher specification than we are seeing on AIrcoach. Also look at Stansted Airlink, yes, it's a double decker bus but to extremely high specification and shows what can be done with a bit of effort. All of them with well designed liveries, good internal colour schemes and some TLC gone into the seating area as well.

https://itthub.net/newsroom/1-9m-investment-for-first-essexs-airlink-sets-high-standards/ (Stansted Airlink)

https://busandtrainuser.com/2019/01/24/railair-youre-there/ (Railair)

BK - I completely agree with you that the positioning of the Aircoach brand and the commercial decisions in terms of pricing have been odd in terms of the product they are offering but that comes back to what I've seen saying for a long while now, essentially that the commercial management of the business has been awful over recent times.

In relation to the livery, nope, it's not awful but at the same time, they could have done an awful lot better than the one that they got, it doesn't really look much better than the old one and ifi they went down the Best Impressions route like every other First airport operation, they's have ended up with something much better. For example, do you know that the colour blocks on the A on the AIrcoach logo are supposed to signify 24 hour service? Nope, neither did I until someone told me. Did you know that the reason they kept the light blue was because people told them that they should because it's associated with them? Why would they need people to tell them the obvious?

The Aircoach situation with the 700 has been going on for so long now that I don't see how it can carry on that way. If First want to really challenge NX on the 700 then there's a rather obvious way to overcome it by a substantial change to the 700 operation without needing to find extra drivers but also increasing capacity. whilst reducing operational costs and also increasing the chances of redeploying vehicles later, I'm not going to spell it out to be obvious, but if First want to be this value operator rather than premium now, they can adjust the name slightly and create something that sits between the 16/41 and the premium offerings.

The new Aircoach vehicles enter service on the 705x to Belfast and Derry tomorrow.

Style over substance still remains my view.

Interestingly in terms of the Aircoach fleet, the Dublin based Mercs are on the 700 today and the 704x is today exclusively Panthers.

They're still on the 705X, but this is the fourth day in a row none have appeared on the 704X and continue to appear on the 700.

In other news, First are launching the Aircoach brand in the UK in just over a weeks time, for a service between Leicester and Birmingham Airport, this will be using ex Airporter Sprinter Minicoaches. They'll use the same logo as Aircoach here.

Also more info on the CityLink/GoBus Castlebar service is here:

https://www.citylink.ie/useful-info/new-route-announcement