Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Wednesday, 8 May 2024
Joint Oireachtas Committee on Transport, Tourism and Sport
Challenges Facing the Bus and Coach Industry: Discussion
Mr. Stephen Kent:
I thank the Deputy for that information. The one thing I can say is that the system is really working now. It takes time to build it. It used to be the case that 6% of our tickets were booked online, so we never knew who was travelling or who might be down the road. We would always have known who was in the departing station, but the difficulty for us was knowing what was down the road. Now, nearly 70% of all bookings are coming in online. It should be higher and it will get higher. We are probably a year into this campaign and we have another campaign just coming up to continue reminding people it is good to book a seat. At least if we know what the situation is, we can provide the additional capacity if we think it is commercially viable to do it. This is the other aspect because sometimes we do not have all the buses required. The system is informing the back office. We are deploying the resources and Mr. Parker's team provides the services. The system is, therefore, working much better than it did, but I accept the Deputy's point that we still need to inform people more about it.
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