BC Ferries did a sudden reversal this week on Route 3, plugging a gaping PR hole before it could cause excessive damage to the company’s image.
On Tuesday, BC Ferries announced it would be restoring the eighth Sunday sailing from Langdale to Horseshoe Bay on April 3, more than 11 months after the sailing was cut from the schedule during the off-peak season.
The stated rationale was that the route’s ferry advisory committee (FAC) asked for a business case review in the fall, that BC Ferries complied, crunched the numbers and discovered it makes “financial sense” after all to restore the lost sailing.
But is that really the story?
Yes, last fall a senior BC Ferries official, Mark Collins, told members of the southern Sunshine Coast FAC that the sailing would be restored “if you can produce a business case.” But Collins also told them that service levels had been “permanently adjusted downward” and they would have to ask the provincial government to reverse the decision.
It was not an encouraging message at the time. So what changed?
A frustrated Route 3 passenger, Chris Cleator, filed a freedom of information request in February asking for BC Ferries’ on-time performance last year for Saturday, Sunday and Monday sailings. After breaking down the stats, Cleator found the route’s on-time performance for Sunday was “absolutely terrible,” as he put it. It was so bad that Sunday sailings from 4:30 p.m. on were late 100 per cent of the time in the months of March, April and November – and bear in mind that the eighth sailing was still operating in March and most of April last year.
Talk about making a bad situation worse.
Cleator shared his findings with media outlets last week, and on Tuesday, the company did its about-face.
What Cleator’s numbers show is that there was never a “business case” for reducing the number of Sunday sailings on Route 3. They also show that BC Ferries was clueless and the frustration of its passengers – who’ve been enduring two-ferry waits on Sundays in the middle of winter – was wholly justified. Instead of serving its customers responsibly, BC Ferries was “sticking it to them,” souring them and ultimately driving away business – not smart for a company ostensibly trying to make money.
It took an FOI request from a ferry hostage to expose just how badly BC Ferries was performing, by its own standards.
