Take your seats for trip into unknown

Certainly if you were watching Fulham playing football in a jam-packed Craven Cottage it would seem like a huge number.

Broken down, however, the 25,000 seats promised as part of the new inter-island ferry service seem less impressive.

For a start it is a return journey, so halve it. And then spread it across Manche Iles ferries, each of which has about 240 seats.

By that stage we are looking at just over 50 ferries leaving these shores over a five-month season. That’s slightly more than two a week.

Quite how the Jersey government gets to its estimate of four return trips a week (including one on Saturdays) is hard to judge but their Economic Development minister does say that ‘discussions are still being held to clarify the extent of the schedule’.

Somewhere in the mix will be trips to Alderney as well.

Whatever the final figures, it’s better than nothing. Thousands of day-trippers will get to Jersey and back having played sport, shopped in St Helier or had a great lunch out.

And all for about a £40 return ticket.

But is it enough to meet people’s hopes? Has the (protracted) tender process raised expectations to a level that the Manche lles service will struggle to meet?

And exactly what value has the tender process added?

After the initial flurry of nine interested parties only two submitted formal tenders. And the ‘winning’ operator still did not fulfil the brief.

But that’s okay because Manche Iles were going to launch this service anyway and don’t want any States money.

So we have a service that doesn’t fit the bill, was going to happen anyway and wants to operate free of States interference.

The two governments say they are going to talk to Manche Iles to ‘maximise the opportunity’. But given that the Granville-based firm needs little from either Guernsey or Jersey it is hard to see what the islands bring to the table aside from good will and berths.

Will it be a success?

A year ago Condor said that a dedicated inter-island day trip service ‘would not be sustainable’ without government help.

Someone is going to be proven wrong.