Mezeron & Steam Packet Master Thread

[ThankU]

twice this week i have been told by the booking office that the ben is fully booked for foot passengers.Any chance of a ride back with mezeron i wonder.

 

Winter sailing are run on reduced capacity to keep crew numbers down.

[Sean South]

Whats the full story Ref.IOMSP and Mezeron coming to a deal over helping out each other in times of bad weather, (MR News today)

 

I think the point of the issue is that there is NO AGREEMENT about helping eachother and it would only be a one-way 'help' anyway

 

can you think of any situation where messyron could possibly help SPCo ?

Well, it looks like The SPCo have more business than they can handle so I suppose all their (and the Union's) whinging will stop now?

[Sean South]

twice this week i have been told by the booking office that the ben is fully booked for foot passengers.Any chance of a ride back with mezeron i wonder.

 

Winter sailing are run on reduced capacity to keep crew numbers down.

So there's plenty of paying customers and they're choosing to turn them away? Jebus! You couldn't make it up could you?

[badlad]

Enoughs enough.Monday boat was full, The Wednesday 2.15 from Heysham is full,Thursdays crossing doesnt leave till 3.00 am due to the tide.I already bought my ticket but have been held up because of the weather.Ive give up and booked with manx2 for the morning.

[Andy730]

I came back from Birkenhead 21 November with a big vehicle and the 'Ben' was busy enough with private cars etc and a good crowd of passengers. So much so that they had to appeal for passengers to make room for others to sit down. They could well have been hard-pressed to accommodate last minute freight.

 

And this about sums it up for me. Full boat - Huge number of passengers. Same the last two times I travelled (last month). No spare room for cargo.

 

This whole issue is dummy spitting / sabre rattling. Woodward worried for his position when he has to explain why the 30% PA profit is down to 20% PA - still double the averge profit for this type of company.

 

I was on the Ben earlier last week, and again on Friday, both times there was plenty of freight on the upper deck.

 

I'll be having another look tomorrow when i'm on it once again.

[Lost Login]

So there's plenty of paying customers and they're choosing to turn them away? Jebus! You couldn't make it up could you?

As the anti Steam Packet cheer leader in chief you probably would.

 

Maybe the fact that the airport was recently closed for roughly 24 hrs and every seat out of Liverpool or Manchest on Monday was taken by 6:30 on Sunday evening had something to do with it.

 

I suppose you expect the SP to run with staffing levels sufficient to cater for a sudden influx just as you appear to expect them to run with enough freight capacity that they shoud never be full. If they did that let me guess who would be the first on hear mouthing off about SP overmanning.

 

Basically where the SP is concerned if they painted their ships blue you would call it an idiotic decision and demand they be red until they painted them red at which point you would be demading they are blue. But as somebody whose family has a personal interest in Mezeron what else should we expect.*

 

*I have no evidence for this but on the basis that if you do not agree with Sean according to Sean you must be Mark Woodward then I presume the opposite will stand true in his bedsit land logic

Edited November 30, 2010 by Lost Login

[Lost Login]

I was on the Ben earlier last week, and again on Friday, both times there was plenty of freight on the upper deck.

 

I'll be having another look tomorrow when i'm on it once again.

 

As we are in the run up to the busiest shopping period of the year I would hope that both freight services are currently fairly busy. If they are not now or over TT then you would really have to worry about their viability

[Lost Login]

Enoughs enough.Monday boat was full, The Wednesday 2.15 from Heysham is full,Thursdays crossing doesnt leave till 3.00 am due to the tide.I already bought my ticket but have been held up because of the weather.Ive give up and booked with manx2 for the morning.

 

Strange then that when I checked on line just now I can book 8 foot passengers or 8 passengers in a 6.5M camper van on the Wednesday 2:15 from Heysham which you say is full!

[badlad]

Ive just checked 6 minutes after you and the website confirms what i had been told on the phone earlier that there is no space available.You may call it strangeI might call it something else as its cost me over £100 to fly back and a wasted £33 ferry ticket.

[Sean South]

So there's plenty of paying customers and they're choosing to turn them away? Jebus! You couldn't make it up could you?

Basically where the SP is concerned if they painted their ships blue you would call it an idiotic decision and demand they be red until they painted them red at which point you would be demading they are blue. But as somebody whose family has a personal interest in Mezeron what else should we expect.*

 

*I have no evidence for this but on the basis that if you do not agree with Sean according to Sean you must be Mark Woodward then I presume the opposite will stand true in his bedsit land logic

Ha! You are so clever! You sussed me out!! Aw dear..... Talk about delusion! Worryingly, You seem obsessed with my little bedsit in bedsit land... Are you my personal stalker? You can get treatment for your little problems ya know!

Edited November 30, 2010 by Sean South

[jack bauer's brother]

Don't know if they still do it but tue and wed used to be what they deemed dangerous goods sailings where they where only allowed something like 50 passengers onboard,have allways tried to avoid these sailings as there was a strong possibility you would not get on.

[Lost Login]

Ive just checked 6 minutes after you and the website confirms what i had been told on the phone earlier that there is no space available.You may call it strangeI might call it something else as its cost me over £100 to fly back and a wasted £33 ferry ticket.

 

Apologies, may be my mistake as I have just thought you may have been looking at 2:15am and I was looking at 2:15 pm. As Jack said I always understood there was limited capacity on the Tuesday 2:15am sailing as it was the "dangerous" goods sailing.

[Lost Login]

You are so clever! You sussed me out!! Aw dear..... Talk about delusion! Worryingly, You seem obsessed with my little bedsit in bedsit land... Are you my personal stalker? You can get treatment for your little problems ya know!

 

Do not flatter yourself. The SP deserve a lot of criticism about many things and a good kicking on occasion. But you remind me of a cross between the little boy who always cried wolf and Peter Karran in that you seem so obsessed by the SP that you jump to write something derogatory about them every time without taking a second to actually think is there in this instance really anything criticise. Whether or not you may have an occasional good point is now so completely beneath what seems nothing but a personal vendetta.

 

I like seeing criticism of the SP if it is valid and I could not care whether they disappear or not as long as the level of service and prices for both passenger and freight to and from the IoM are protected. The protection of services and prices should in my view be the primary concern of anybody living in the IoM not who provides them. However you do not seem to care about that in fact I think you would be happy to see no ferry services to the IoM if that meant the end of the SP and consequently you seem to be little better that a troll. You are not P K in disguise are you?

[Sean South]

You are so clever! You sussed me out!! Aw dear..... Talk about delusion! Worryingly, You seem obsessed with my little bedsit in bedsit land... Are you my personal stalker? You can get treatment for your little problems ya know!

 

Do not flatter yourself. The SP deserve a lot of criticism about many things and a good kicking on occasion. But you remind me of a cross between the little boy who always cried wolf and Peter Karran in that you seem so obsessed by the SP that you jump to write something derogatory about them every time without taking a second to actually think is there in this instance really anything criticise. Whether or not you may have an occasional good point is now so completely beneath what seems nothing but a personal vendetta.

 

I like seeing criticism of the SP if it is valid and I could not care whether they disappear or not as long as the level of service and prices for both passenger and freight to and from the IoM are protected. The protection of services and prices should in my view be the primary concern of anybody living in the IoM not who provides them. However you do not seem to care about that in fact I think you would be happy to see no ferry services to the IoM if that meant the end of the SP and consequently you seem to be little better that a troll. You are not P K in disguise are you?

You think I'm a troll? I put up reasoned sensible arguments and when you can't answer them sensibly you resort to personal abuse (bedsits in bedsit land, troll, PK in disguise etc etc). Just because we don't all agree with your opinion doesn't mean that you need to resort to petty childish playground type abuse. You did similar on other threads (iirc).

 

Anyway, back on thread. And again I assert that , as you've all amply proven, there is plenty of both passenger and freight business and certainly more than the SPCo can handle currently. So, why not have an additional operator with additional capacity. Mr Woodward has done nothing but show how badly run the company is in that it sh1ts itself at the first sign of competition.

 

LostLogin asserts that he has no link with the SPCo or it's management only that he cares that the island has a reliable cheap sea transport operator and that is absolutely a fair point. Given the credentials of Mezeron and it's parent I still fail to see what worries him so. There is no evidence that I have seen yet that shows that we should have any worries of their ability to operate an excellent service for the benefit of the island as well as themselves. The SPCo on the other hand has shown it's hand in that it is obviously in a very precarious financial position with debts of over £200million and they themselves warned us that they could not afford to operate if there was any jeopardy to their numbers. So LostLogin you still believe the SPCo is a better option than Mezeron?

 

Also LostLogin you accuse me of having no care for the IoM given that I do not currently live there. Consider this though: I live on an adjacent island currently and travel back several times a year. Our needs don't get any consideration from the PSCo. They have consistently run the route down with unreasonable timetables and unreliability so it's no wonder the numbers on these routes are poor. Will it be better under another operator? Who knows. Can it be much worse? Hardly!

[manshimajin]

Also LostLogin you accuse me of having no care for the IoM given that I do not currently live there. Consider this though: I live on an adjacent island currently and travel back several times a year. Our needs don't get any consideration from the PSCo. They have consistently run the route down with unreasonable timetables and unreliability so it's no wonder the numbers on these routes are poor. Will it be better under another operator? Who knows. Can it be much worse? Hardly!

When the service is in place it's good for my needs. When, for much of the year, it is not - then I find the drive round a bit of a bind. Fortunately we have now found a route to Heysham that is totally illogical from the part of Ireland where we have our place - but it is a much more attractive route scenically than some of the others and come what may we have to overnight so we indulge ourselves in enjoying the drive (snow willing) and checking out places en-route.

 

Within your comment there is an issue that keeps coming into my mind. Freight wise there is zero doubt that the IOMSPC market is the Island and its businesses. When it comes to passengers MW stated in the past that his market was the 84,000 inhabitants of the IOM too. That, IMO, ignores the almost 70 million people living around the Island on the West and East rocks.