8.4 Ferries, Coach Services & Ground Transfers

Ferries, Coach Services & Ground Transfers

Water transport that is not a cruise, plus coaches and airport transfers, make up the "surface" half of the ground-products syllabus. The unifying idea is that these products are quoted per vehicle far more often than per seat, so a consultant who quotes them like an air ticket will get the price wrong.

1. Ferry Vessel Families

Scheduled passenger shipping uses three vessel families, and the vessel type dictates what you can actually sell.

• Ro-pax ferry (roll-on/roll-off passenger) - a conventional ship with enclosed vehicle decks reached by a bow or stern ramp, and passenger decks above. It carries cars, motorhomes, coaches and freight trailers alongside foot passengers, and on longer routes it carries cabins. This is the workhorse of the English Channel, the Irish Sea, the Baltic and the Adriatic.
• Fast craft, also called HSC (High Speed Craft) - catamarans, fast monohulls and jetfoils that roughly halve the crossing time. Trade-offs the client must be told about up front: many are passenger-only or take very few cars, baggage rules are tighter, outside decks are often closed at speed, and fast craft cancel far more readily in rough weather because their sea-state limits are lower than a conventional ship's.
• Hovercraft - now a niche product. Hovertravel crosses the Solent between Southsea in Portsmouth and Ryde on the Isle of Wight in under 10 minutes and is described as the only scheduled passenger hovercraft service in Europe. Cross-Channel hovercraft ceased in 2000, beaten by the Channel Tunnel. Hovercraft carry foot passengers only.

The same logic extends inland to river and lake ferries such as the Bosphorus and Lake Constance crossings, and to water taxis and commuter boats such as the Venice water taxis and the Chao Phraya express boats in Bangkok. These are usually bought locally rather than pre-booked, but a professional itinerary still states the frequency and the last departure of the day.

2. Foot Passenger vs Accompanied Vehicle

A ferry booking is either a foot passenger booking, priced per person like a rail ticket, or an accompanied vehicle booking, in which the vehicle is the priced unit and the occupants are added onto it. Mis-describing the vehicle is the single most common ferry error in an agency.

Day crossing vs overnight crossing. Short day crossings sell deck space and reserved lounges; passengers stay with their hand luggage and are recalled to the vehicle deck before arrival. On an overnight sailing the operator will normally require every passenger to hold either a reclining seat or a berth, and cabins grade from inside four-berth economy through outside twin to suites, exactly as they do on a cruise ship - but on a ferry the cabin is a supplement to the crossing fare, never the product itself.

Check-in and boarding cut-offs are hard. Vehicle decks must be loaded and secured before sailing, so ferry cut-offs are enforced far more strictly than airline gate times. On Dover-Calais and Dover-Dunkirk, DFDS states that check-in typically closes 60 minutes before scheduled departure for vehicles and 40 minutes before for foot passengers, and advises allowing 120 minutes in high season to clear border controls. P&O Ferries recommends 120 minutes for foot passengers to France and at least 60 minutes for vehicles, and 90 minutes on Hull-Rotterdam. Miss the cut-off and the sailing is normally forfeited, although some flexible cross-Channel fares let a driver travel a few hours either side of the booked departure.

Procedure: quoting a vehicle crossing

1. Confirm route, date and sailing time, and whether the return is fixed or open.
2. Measure the vehicle - length and height including anything on the roof or towed behind.
3. Count occupants, ages and any pets; ferries price children and infants separately.
4. Choose the accommodation - deck, reserved seat or cabin grade - and check whether it is compulsory overnight.
5. Add extras: pet cabins, priority loading, on-board meal packages, fuel/environmental surcharges.
6. Confirm the check-in cut-off, terminal and required documents; issue the booking reference and vehicle plate on the voucher.

3. Corridors a Consultant Actually Sells

4. How Ferries Are Distributed

Ferries are not sold through the airline GDS the way air, car and hotel are. There is no equivalent of a neutral ferry availability display inside a standard air PNR. In practice a consultant books through the operator's own trade site or agent portal, through a ferry aggregator or consolidator such as the well-known online ferry comparison sites, through a bedbank or tour-operator system that has contracted ferry inventory, or through a specialist ferry consolidator that pays commission. The output is a booking reference plus an e-ticket or boarding card, not an airline-style electronic ticket number, and there is no BSP settlement behind it.

Passenger rights. Ferry passenger protection is regional, not global. In the EU, Norway and Iceland, Regulation (EU) No 1177/2010 on the rights of passengers travelling by sea and inland waterway has applied since 18 December 2012. It gives passengers information no later than 30 minutes after the scheduled departure time when a service is delayed or cancelled, care and assistance, and a choice between re-routing and reimbursement when departure is cancelled or delayed by more than 90 minutes. For a delay in arrival, the minimum compensation is 25% of the ticket price - after 1 hour on a scheduled journey of up to 4 hours, 2 hours on a journey of 4 to 8 hours, 3 hours on a journey of 8 to 24 hours, or 6 hours beyond that - rising to 50% where the delay exceeds double those thresholds. Weather endangering safe operation and other extraordinary circumstances relieve the carrier of the compensation duty. Other regions have their own, different regimes; never quote EU figures for a Caribbean or Asian operator.

5. Coach Products

Scheduled intercity coach networks such as FlixBus, National Express, Greyhound Lines and Megabus sell a per-person seat, often yield-managed like a low-cost airline, with a modest hold-luggage allowance and reserved or unreserved seating. They are the budget backbone of overland travel and connect to airports and ferry ports.

Private charter coach is quoted per vehicle per day, never per seat. Cost drivers are coach size, kilometres, driver duty hours, driver accommodation and meals on multi-day tours, tolls, city access charges, parking, and repositioning legs. In the EU, driver hours follow Regulation (EC) No 561/2006: a break of at least 45 minutes after 4.5 hours of driving, a maximum of 9 hours' daily driving extendable to 10 hours twice a week, and a minimum daily rest of 11 hours. An excursion whose driving alone exceeds the daily limit is not legal, whatever the client wants - a classic itinerary-planning trap.

6. The Airport Transfer Product Family

Pricing variables to check before quoting: per vehicle or per person; one-way or return, since returns are usually discounted; night and public-holiday supplements; the free waiting allowance after landing, commonly around 45 to 60 minutes for airport pickups before waiting time is charged, though this varies by supplier; whether flight monitoring is included so the driver re-times a delayed arrival; child seats, which are legally required in many countries; and oversized luggage such as skis, golf clubs or wheelchairs.

The supplier on the ground is usually a DMC (Destination Management Company) - the local ground handler that contracts the vehicles, employs the drivers and reps, and provides the 24/7 emergency number. The selling agent contracts with the DMC or a transfer wholesaler; the DMC, not the agent, is the party physically present when a flight diverts.

What a transfer voucher must show

1. Booking reference and the supplier's trading name.
2. Flight number and inbound arrival date and local time.
3. Airport and terminal, plus the exact meeting point.
4. Number of passengers and number of luggage pieces.
5. Vehicle type booked and whether the price is per vehicle or per person.
6. Full drop-off address with local-language spelling.
7. Whether the fare is prepaid or payable locally, and in which currency.
8. The supplier's local 24-hour emergency telephone number.
9. Free waiting time and the return pickup time if applicable.

The buffer rule. Never schedule an onward transfer, coach departure or connecting ferry so tightly that a normal immigration and baggage queue breaks it. For an international arrival, allow at least 60 to 90 minutes from scheduled touchdown before the client must be moving, and longer at hubs with biometric border checks or a terminal change. Working in the opposite direction, time an outbound transfer backwards from the check-in closing time, not from the departure time.

Worked example: one arrival at Paris CDG, four ways

Four passengers, four large cases, arriving on a scheduled international flight, going to a hotel in central Paris. Figures are illustrative and vary by season and supplier.

The exam point is the crossover: because shared shuttles are priced per person and private vehicles per vehicle, the private van beats the shared shuttle from three or four passengers upwards while also removing the multi-stop wait. Quote per-person products for one or two travellers and per-vehicle products for families and groups.