Conor Buckley, chairman of Fastnet Line, speaks to SANDRA O'CONNELL
I LIVE IN Castletownshend, in west Cork. I started an incoming-tour-group business, My Guide Ireland, 12 years ago, and about 18 months ago I launched Longship, an energy- management business.
In between I helped set up a tourism lobby group, West Cork Tourism Co-Operative, looking at ways to bring more visitors to the region.
We realised that one of the biggest problems facing us was access: we’re quite remote, and since 2006 there has been no Cork-Swansea ferry to help. So we rounded up 300 tourism businesses and individuals and asked them to invest €10,000 each. We then managed to convince a Finnish bank to lend us €6.5 million and bought ourselves a ship.
The closest I’d come to sailing prior to this was in a sea kayak I bought for the kids. But I understand business and I know tourism. The way we look at it is that it’s a floating hotel that just happens to travel between Swansea and Cork each day.
Most mornings I’m up at 6.15am, and when I’m on the road to work I do my “moonlighting” – taking calls for Fastnet Line, working with our MD or talking to the bank.
It’s going really well. We have 20 per cent of our target for the year already in advance bookings, despite having only started the service a week ago. The big thing is that kids go free.
At some stage in the morning I’ll check in with my My Guide partner. We bring in about 6,000 people a year, mostly from the US or Germany. I’ll have lunch on the hoof – too often it’s a sandwich from a petrol station – but my energy- management business has clients across the country, and I have to be on site.
Meetings with my Fastnet colleagues are held after 6pm. We’ll cover topics such as marketing and promotions, safety issues or operations. At the moment our efforts are centred on promoting the new service and making sure the visitors we bring in use the services of the co-op members while they are here.
If we get it up and running successfully, we will be bringing in about 100,000 visitors a year to the region, which will be worth an additional €50m in revenues. It will be a nice boost for tourism providers in the area and will also support about 1,000 jobs.
On Fastnet meeting days I don’t get home until about 11pm. It’s a long day, but I don’t mind, because I enjoy it and because it means I get to keep the weekends free to spend with my family.
fastnetline.com