Objections lack enterprise claims tours applicant
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• Western SMT showed "an abysmal and inept" failure to liaise with a steamer company in its own group when it advertised a tour from Ayr to link up with a steamer service which had been discontinued two years ago, Mr G. Quin told the Scottish Traffic Commissioners in Glasgow last week.
Mr Quin was speaking at the continued hearing of his application for a service of day and extended tours to named destinations. Objections came from Western SMT, Dodds Coaches, W. Alexander and Sons (Midlands), A.A. Motors Ltd, and Highland Omnibuses. The chairman of the Commissioners, Mr A. B. Birnie, reserved his decision to permit the study of 31 documents lodged during the hearings.
The applicant said he had brought 10 witnesses and five letters to the first hearing. The witnesses, he said, had enjoyed the
tours of one of the objectors, Dodds, but wanted variety. There was room, thought Mr Quin, for improvement in the coach tour business of Ayr. He was wholeheartedly in favour of enterprise from whatever source it came he said, but in Ayr it had been lacking.
Mr Quin criticized the objectors for lack of enterprise and cited as an example the non-running of services on Saturdays. A.A. Motor Services, he added running half-hourly from Ayr to Ardrossan, dropped passengers half-a-mile from the Arran steamer berth and had never shown enough initiative to take passengers right to the steamer quay as he now proposed to do.
The chairman asked Mr W. Morris, manager of A.A. Motor Services, whether there had been any complaints about the half-mile walk and he was told that there had not. The chairman concluded that Ayrshire people must be very tolerant.
Mr Quin said he was proposing to operate a 12-seater minibus on some tours as well as two older coaches and was criticized by the objectors for insisting that he would run tours once advertised however small the numbers. The objectors said that this would lead to a speedy bankruptcy. but Mr Quin thought this was a pessimistic view.
If the objectors put into tours half the effort that they put into opposing the applications of others they might do better on their tours. Mr N. Dodds, of Dodds Coaches, said that tours business was not increasing, it was not economical to operate 12-seaters at the wages they had to pay and that in Dodds's experience Saturday tours were not wanted.