Opportunities are many for the coach industry in areas including education, tourism and home-to-work, but leveraging them relies upon the sector promoting itself, delegates at The Big Coach Conversation heard on 27 March.
Among those speakers was Neil Micklethwaite, Chief Operating Officer of CMAC Group. It was one of the organisers of the event and he highlights how opportunity sits next to more awkward work in areas such as decarbonisation, recruitment, and technology deployment.
The Coach Travel Group CEO Tom Stables broadly agrees, putting what he says are many opportunities for growth alongside challenges. Among the latter, the move to zero-emission will be “a generation-defining issue,” and Mr Stables believes that a major threat there is a lack of coherent policy.
Coaching needs to help to change that. “If we don’t, we will get left behind or forgotten,” he continues.
ComfortDelGro CEO Europe Edward Thomas adds that the overall coach brand should be promoted. He advocates work with education and tourism as part of that.
However, Mr Thomas is more reserved than some others in his view on potential for scheduled coaching. ComfortDelGro has wound down Megabus operations in England. “There are always opportunities for new players if they want to make losses,” he jokes.
Changes to Megabus were based on demand. It has gone back to basics on the customer offering across its remaining network, with a focus on delivering those services as efficiently as possible.
In a different note to other players in scheduled coaching, Mr Thomas suggests that the scheduled market does not show the same level of demand as 10 years ago, with university students an area that has declined.
Other opportunities for the coach industry include home-to-work transport. Zeelo Chief Operating Officer Franck Dessenis says that over 50% of the opportunities created by Zeelo in that field are with businesses that previously had no employee transport services.
Existing customers should not be forgotten in growth bids, George Regal Travel Managing Director Leon Hart adds, who advocates keeping things simple.
“Service your existing contracts but be ready to pounce on other work,” he advises. “We wanted to build out full days for vehicles and drivers so we did a lot of work with our existing database, looking at existing customers to leverage their requirements.”
