Rory McCall - Passenger sales manager, Celtic Link Ferries
Our office is in Rosslare Harbour and I live in Waterford city, so it’s an hour’s drive to get here for 8.30am.
The first thing I do when I get in is implement the yield management system. Each day the tariff changes depending on demand. I take a review of forward bookings and set prices accordingly.
We used to be a freight shipping company but five years ago started taking leisure passengers to France as well. We position ourselves as the “low-cost ferry company”.
I also look after marketing, trying to get our name into people’s consciousness as an alternative to the big ferry companies. Unlike them, though, we don’t have big marketing budgets.
Today I’m doing follow-up work on the launch of our new ship, the Celtic Horizon. We had 500 guests on board to see it this week, everyone from caravan clubs to hauliers.
The new ship has two-suite cabins; six-, four- and two-berths; as well as a kids play area, cinema and restaurant. We sail to France all through the winter, so it was a good time for the launch.
I’m also talking to Wexford chamber of commerce to try and boost our message to its members.
I spend a good part of my day taking passenger calls, helping people with dates and bookings.
The business was set up by a local family and a local entrepreneur who came together in a partnership to find a cheaper way to get goods to France. I think that family background informs our corporate culture. We just work on that basis that if you give people a good price and treat them nicely, they’ll come back.
For lunch I’ll go to a nearby hotel for soup and a sandwich. There are just a few of us in the office and we all go up together.
In the afternoon I’ll work on online marketing. It’s a job in itself but it works. We exceeded our targets by 40 per cent last year and search-engine optimisation played a large part in that.
If we have more customers on any given day than we did on the same day the previous year, we are happy. If not, we get annoyed with ourselves.
I’ll finish up in the office at 5.30pm but because of the kind of business we are, if it’s a sailing day I’ll head down to the port to help with the check-ins. We sail three times a week at 9.30pm and the crossing takes 17 hours.
So far we’re delighted with how things have gone since we started as a passenger ferry. The business has really started to build and the fact that we now have this new ship will boost demand even more. It’s nice to be part of a good news story.
- celticlinkferries.com