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Steam Packet considers shake-up of fleet


HelmutX

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10 hours ago, mollag said:

I'm thinking that the next Vessel purchase for the Packet should be a sea going Tug  🙄

Condors arrangement with Guernsey seems to be working. They managed the sister ship to the Ben, sail it from New Zealand, get it refurbished and it is going into operational service before the end of October this year. It’s a shame what’s happening with the SPCO, perhaps too much political meddling? 

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36 minutes ago, 2112 said:

Condors arrangement with Guernsey seems to be working. They managed the sister ship to the Ben, sail it from New Zealand, get it refurbished and it is going into operational service before the end of October this year. It’s a shame what’s happening with the SPCO, perhaps too much political meddling? 

So it’s not actually operational so how do you know it’s working well? Condor doesn’t have a good reputation for reliability 

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Condors boat is pretty much the Ben when it first arrived before they extended the passenger areas and put the bar and the lounge on. Only carries 400 passengers. They maybe happy with that. Manx public weren't so the Ben got changed

 

the Commodore Clipper was never a copy of the Ben.  I traveled on her in 2003 to Guernsey, she felt like a totally different boat. She made the Ben look like a cattle wagon.  

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13 hours ago, lowell thurber said:

Condors boat is pretty much the Ben when it first arrived before they extended the passenger areas and put the bar and the lounge on. Only carries 400 passengers. They maybe happy with that. Manx public weren't so the Ben got changed

The Channel Islands are a much less attractive place to reach by ferry than the Isle of Man is and fewer people do so.  According to the UK Department for Transport, there were 571,000 sea passenger journeys between the UK and the Isle of Man in 2022 (downloadable spreadsheet here) while between the UK and the Channel Islands there were only 257,000, despite them having nearly twice our population combined.  This explains why they need smaller ships, there's less demand.  Though whether we need one the size of the Manxman is another issue.

Of course the flipside of this is that their air figures are higher per capita, though that isn't the only reason that Jersey's in particular, are more.  One other interesting thing in those DfT figures is the CI sea pax has also risen to higher levels than they were pre-pandemic, up from 208,000 in 2019.  However this had been in steady decline since hitting 360,000 in 2013.  The Isle of Man is also up from 537,000 in 2019, but in this case the 2022 figure was a new high since at least 2012.  So post-Covid we have definitely seen a move to sea travel more generally than here, though it's particularly strong to the Island.

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14 hours ago, lowell thurber said:

Condors boat is pretty much the Ben when it first arrived before they extended the passenger areas and put the bar and the lounge on. Only carries 400 passengers. They maybe happy with that. Manx public weren't so the Ben got changed

 

57 minutes ago, Manxman2000 said:

Condors boat is pretty much the Ben when it first arrived before they extended the passenger areas and put the bar and the lounge on. Only carries 400 passengers. They maybe happy with that. Manx public weren't so the Ben got changed

 

the Commodore Clipper was never a copy of the Ben.  I traveled on her in 2003 to Guernsey, she felt like a totally different boat. She made the Ben look like a cattle wagon.  

Except @lowell thurber is talking specifically about Condor Islander, ex MV Straitsman, not Clipper. Context is everything @Manxman2000

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