CF Shuttles

This is a page for discussion of shuttles at Canterbury Faire.

Why does CF provide shuttles to/from site?

Shuttles to/from site are provided to make attending the event as easy as possible for far travellers, or people without other transport options. It is important to note, there are no public transport options available to the site we use for Canterbury Faire, which lies significantly outside of the Christchurch metropolitan area. While a 50 minute drive is not too onerous to a local, or to someone in a rental car, if we did not provide an option then we would be significantly burdening barony members with the task of retrieving people from the airport. Importantly, by centralising the service, and actively hiring a shuttle company to ferry people to/from the event we:

• Reduce the number of our barony members who need to make additional trips from the airport to the Canterbury Faire site.
• Provide an option that makes it convenient for far travellers to attend.
• Provide an option that means a far traveller without contacts in the barony can reliably expect to attend Faire.

Who uses the shuttle service?

While the option to take a shuttle to site is made available to members of the barony, take up of this option is extremely low. Shuttle bookings fall into 3 groups:

• Barony members being picked up from their houses. This averages between 2 and 10 bookings per year.
• Ildhafn members being picked up from the airport.
• Mainland Lochacians (Australians) being picked up from the airport.

The exact breakdown for shuttle bookings in 2014 were:

• 1 member of Darton
• 13 members of Ildhafn
• ~35 Australians

There were ~10 additional Australians attending Canterbury Faire in 2014. These were either handled by individual households who arranged their transport to/from site (essentially friends), or by people hiring cars for the duration.

How it works

We evaluated the shuttle companies available in Christchurch for cost, and have been using our current shuttle provider for several years.
People booking for Canterbury Faire are offered the option of booking a shuttle to/from Christchurch.
It is traditional to deputise a member of the barony to act as Shuttle Coordinator as part of the stewarding team. They handle all interaction with shuttle companies, plan the schedules for pickup/dropoff, and liase with anyone who books for a shuttle or needs a shuttle.

Pricing in 2014 was:
$32 each way
$15 for a non airport stop.
This matches to the pricing structure we're given by the shuttle company. However, it is worth noting that the prices we receive when booking are -per trip- pricing, not -per person- pricing. We are hiring the shuttle to make the run, and being charged for their time and fuel at a fixed rate.

Costs for CF2014 shuttles were:

• $1710 to hire 9 shuttles @ $190 each.
• Pickup fees totalling to $1900

Important concepts:

• If someone doesn't book, we probably can't provide a shuttle for them.
• If someone books a shuttle, but cancels inside the last week before Faire, or while at Faire, we will still charge them for the shuttle. Failure to notify us of a change of plan will mean we charge you anyway, because we've had to book our shuttles on the basis of the requests.

Problems

The prices we charge for CF are largely fixed well in advance (usually ~9 months out), but changes in fuel prices/other costs for shuttle companies mean these may not be reflective of the price later. Year on year pricing should be reviewed to insure we are aware of trends.
While we offer a shuttle service for any times, it is not always practical to arrange a shuttle for an individual on a given day. This means a hidden part of shuttle organisation is to either to pick up those whose flight times just don't match to when we can arrange shuttles, or to find someone who is willing to pick up the person. As the comittment in offering a shuttle service initially was to make attending the event as easy as possible, we have a culture of accomodation, not one of saying we can't meet a request.

Recommendations for future years

The pricing structure we currently use is not adequately reflecting our costs for non-airport pickup/dropoff locations. In particular, we were charged either $20 or $25 per pickup location, but we only charged $15 per location to Faire attendees. Maximilian von Monsterberg (talk) 10:07, 27 January 2014 (EST)