Volcanic activity: Businesses winning the Iceland 'boom'
There's a silver lining to every cloud, even the one made up of volcanic ash. While air carriers are licking their wounds from losing an estimated $200 million a day due to the eruption of the Eyjafjallajokull volcano in Iceland, many other firms are smacking their chops at the opportunity to attract new customers. So who got rolling as the planes stayed on the ground?
Planes trains and automobiles...and ferries.
Stranded passengers have been booking just about any mode in Europe-rental cars, cabs, buses, trains and ferries-to get their travel plans back on track. Vendors are running full sprint to keep up with demand: Tour operators and corporations are chartering buses to get customers and executives from one end of Europe to the other. About half of Barcelona-based coach company Julia Tours' 100-bus fleet, as a result, is not in Spain but all over Continental Europe.
Rail and ferry service in Europe have been running at full throttle since the volcano's ash spread all over European airspace last Thursday. Even the luxury cruise ship Queen Mary 2 sold out of berths for its next two transatlantic crossings, departing from Southampton, England.
Though airports have finally opened, hundreds of planes and crews aren't where they're supposed to be, creating a logistical mess that will take the carriers days to untangle. "We've had surges like this before, with air strikes or bad weather, but nothing like this," says Eurostar official Richard Holligan. "This is quite sustained."
Eurostar, the high speed rail service that connects the United Kingdom and the continent via the Chunnel, added 41 trains through the weekend. From the eruption to April 20, it has transported 210,000 passengers, 60,000 more than had booked seats. It also introduced a temporary one-way 89 pound ($137)-fare, half what a ticket would usually cost if booked at the last minute. "Problem is," says Holligan, "there are only so many seats."
Those who can't find tickets for one of those coveted seats have been heading to the ports of Dover in England and Calais in France to book passage on ferries crossing the Channel-which has been churning with jam-packed ships going back and forth around the clock. Passengers have waited as long as three hours in Calais to buy tickets.
French operator SeaFrance, which was on strike a few weeks ago, experienced a 120 percent rise in car bookings and received reservations for 108 buses on the first night of the ban alone. Phones at Dover-based P&O Ferries, a subsidiary of DP World, have been ringing off the hook-as many as 400 calls every 15 minutes.
Demand for crossing tickets was so high, the company's web site crashed. "We have never seen anything like this before," says Michelle Ulyatt, a spokeswoman for Dover-based P&O Ferries, a subsidiary of DP World. Over seven days, the company's 7-ship fleet transported 30,000 passengers traveling without cars, she explained, compared to around 2,000 most weeks.
The train to the bus to the ferry to the...
Another beneficiary of the volcano's disruptive eruption: buses. Ferry companies have chartered dozens of them to shuttle passengers back and forth from the rail stations to the port. The airplane-stranded have scrambled to scoop up bus tickets. Eurolines, Europe's leading coach company, experienced a 600 percent rise in traffic on lines between London and Paris, Dublin, Amsterdam and Brussels.
Customers with deeper pockets are hiring cabs. Addison Lee, a minicab company in London, has deposited dozens of corporate clients, says spokesman Alistair Laycock, from London to the mainland. The farthest destination this past week: a 600-mile jaunt from London to Milan. The price: about 3,000 pounds (roughly $4,700). "We have to look after our clients. If they have a meeting in Amsterdam, we have to get them there," he says. That hasn't been easy or cheap. On the Milan trip, Addison Lee sent two drivers. "In all honesty, we're more profitable when we run out of London," says Laycock.
