Following a successful partnership over the Summer months, customers on the Ullapool-
Coach operator, Scottish Citylink, which
operates the service, deployed 48 additional coaches over the summer to cater for
whenever bookings for the service exceeded the capacity more than 48 hours in advance
of the departure time.
As the coach operator runs the service on a commercial basis without any public sector investment, it cannot guarantee that it can add in extra vehicles to the route with less than 48 hours' notice unless the level of demand covered the operational costs.
All parties agreed that it was not commercially viable for the operator to ensure
that sufficient capacity could always be provided for anyone expecting to travel
without a booking but that they would work together with the aim to ensure that this
increased capacity service would be deployed wherever possible when passengers made
an advance booking.
Scottish Citylink indicated that there was often variable demand
on Sundays over the winter months with demand occasionally exceeding the main coach
capacity.
As a result, the agreement between the Comhairle, HITRANS and Scottish Citylink has now been extended to cover all Sundays up until the New Year.
This will ensure that, if additional capacity is required and can feasibly be deployed
at short notice, any operational losses incurred by Scottish Citylink would be underwritten
by these two parties.
Uisdean Robertson, chair of the comhairle’s transportation
Committee, said emphasised: “For operational reasons, this additional capacity cannot
in any way be completely guaranteed by the operator and there remains a very real
imperative that all passengers should make every effort to book as far in advance
as possible of when they intend to travel from either Inverness or Ullapool.”
Peter Knight, operations director at Scottish Citylink, said: “In trying to provide the best possible service to all passengers on the Ullapool to Inverness route we will continue to work with all parties to try and ensure that sufficient capacity can be deployed in time, however I would again urge all of our customers to help us achieve this by booking the service well in advance.”
Extra buses on Ullapool ferry run over Christmas
16 Nov 2017
