ITS JUNE, ITS SUMMERTIME – BUT NOT AS WE KNOW IT!

Date Added 18/06/2020

Time seems to fly, in a strange way.  We find ourselves in week 13 of pandemic restrictions and the situation we and the whole coach and tourism industry find ourselves in can be illustrated by simply today’s date – Thursday 18th June!  Today would be Ascot Ladies Day, and whilst the weather has gone back to normal, being unsettled, windy and wet, the current situation is far from normal!  So, ‘normally’ we’d be in the peak of our private hire coaching season, with every coach and every driver, full and part time being needed. We’d also have 8 Own Product coach tours away, a private tour and 6 excursions just between Monday and Friday of this week! The place would be buzzing – but instead the site is very quiet, the coach park remains full of coaches, unmoved for 12 weeks and the offices are three quarters empty too! However, it could be worse – and we all need to stay positive!

BUS SERVICES

Buses are up to about 75% of normal operation.  Thanks and well done to all our bus drivers who are providing valuable services for our customers 6 days a week.  Ridership is still well down but we expect numbers to increase now that the shops are open again. 

COACH TRAVEL SERVICES

With coach travel, we are still being impeded by the government guidelines of 2 metre social distancing.  Our industry is supporting the greater tourism industry with pressure to get the government to reduce this to 1 metre – we believe that this, together with our other precautions of face coverings, forward facing –high back seats and our enhanced cleaning regimes, is perfectly safe for all. 1 metre would help us all enormously and it would at least enable us to operate up to about 60% capacity. We could of course, offer trips now on this basis but we don’t want to be seen as going against government guidelines. 

So consequently, there’s not been much change with coach hire, sadly cancellations keep coming in and whilst we are receiving a good number of transfers and bookings for next year (thank you!), the rest of this year is not looking very busy yet! 

HOLIDAYS AND EXCURSIONS THIS YEAR

It is good news that from what we hear, the government will be allowing hotels, pubs and restaurants to open on the 5th July.  This will be a great step forward for us all and we’re looking forward to that!  However, having spoken to many of our customers and hoteliers, it is clear that we can’t operate holidays yet so we’ve had to sadly cancel all our July holidays and Great Breaks – sorry to cause yet more disappointment!  But, we are planning to be up and running for August and we’ll have more news on this exciting prospect in the next update!  And with excursions, things look a bit brighter in that we’ll be looking to operate as many of our Express Excursions programme as possible, hopefully from Sunday 19th July onwards. Again, more news on this soon. 

We are now sending letters to all our customers who are booked on our July holiday departures.  We are doing this in date of departure order, therefore letters will be dispatched over the course of the next two weeks.  

HOLIDAYS IN 2021!

You’ll remember that we are currently finalising our list of all holidays and Great Breaks, commencing this autumn and running right through Christmas, spring and next summer.  This is almost ready for printing – our SeeMore Loyalty Club members will receive the list first, by post and then our main mailing list will be sent it shortly afterwards, by email or by post, according to our customers preferences.  Even though the country is in a state of flux, holiday prices will be fixed for next year; we’ll provide very flexible booking arrangements and we’ll be providing ‘Covid: 19 assurance’ too!

Finally, and most importantly, for all our customers, whether you are a coach hirer, a holiday or day trip customer or one of our many bus users, we hope that you are keeping well, virus free and as happy as possible during this extraordinary situation.  We hope you’ll still be keen to travel with us as soon as you can and finally, thank you very much for your continued support and custom during what is a very difficult time for all of us.

We do miss you – and look forward to seeing you again, hopefully very soon!

JOHN R JOHNSON

COMMERCIAL DIRECTOR