ED committee member criticises Aurigny’s handling of flight cancellation announcement
IF AURIGNY does not put on more routes to support students going back to university in September, they will have failed the public, a deputy has said.
Economic Development committee member Deputy Neil Inder took to Twitter to show his displeasure at the situation.
‘As a member of ED we got the notification of the Aurigny winter schedules at 1.51pm this afternoon,’ he wrote.
‘You’d think they would a) know students need to return, b) had the sense to talk to Education, c) told their political board at [States Trading and Supervisory Board].’
He went on to say the airline had scuppered hundreds of students’ ability to get to their university, and called it a ‘bloody shambles’.
‘Parents been hanging on for news, flights cancelled #reviveandthrive what a joke.’
He also criticised Aurigny’s last-minute survey where they asked students to fill out where they needed to travel to in order to get to university.
‘Anyone in the world can access that survey, it’s not targeted, so out of that data will come utter garbage,’ he told the Guernsey Press.
‘This is just not how you do it, it’s my job – I would know.
‘In any normal marketing service you would have a verified database that segmented into different profiles to target the survey by email to the relevant people that you’re actually trying to get information from.’
He said Aurigny should not have stuck out a basic Survey Monkey survey after, what he called, a disastrous and catastrophic press release about not putting on more flights in September.
‘As an economic enabler that is costing millions a year.
‘The least they could do is put on some more services for students who need to get back to their education.’
He felt that, given that Aurigny had said the reduced service would be reviewed by the end of August, that there was a certain amount of public expectancy that flights would pick up and more routes would be put on, as people had been booking.
‘I do not think Aurigny has served the public well in this instance,’ he said.
In response to his colleague and committee president’s comments that students could still fly to Southampton and just get one or several trains to their final destination, he said Deputy Charles Parkinson ‘read the room horribly wrong’.
Deputy Inder turned to Condor to see if there was anything they could do to help: ‘Comes to something when politicians have to muse whether private companies can assist them when the government airline is out of control.
‘It may not be possible for the low hundreds of students and cost of boat running. [But if you] don’t ask, [you] don’t get.’
