It’s just after 12pm in the offices of Aircoach in Skybridge House at Dublin Airport, and managing director Kim Swan has just received word that her drivers have accepted a new pay deal following a dispute that has prompted them to work “under protest” for weeks.
She is understandably in good form. The company is celebrating 25 years in business, and is growing again after challenges in recent years that have included the Covid-19 pandemic as well as an industry-wide shortage of drivers.
Swan says the company’s as yet unpublished financial results for the past year will be down on the profit of €1.6 million it generated in the year to March 2023, but she insists she is now “turning the business around” and focused on “getting it back to basics”.
“Aircoach has come through so much,” she says. “Given everything we’ve been through with Covid, we should be celebrating the fact the business is still here. It has been a difficult time.
“We’ve increased our services in Dublin and Belfast, and we are growing and developing the Cork route.”
Swan, who led the successful pay talks with drivers, describes herself as a “resilient” person, a trait instilled in her growing up on the north Antrim coast in Ballygally near Larne.
As a young girl, she had her heart set on a career in Irish dancing but that plan was “kiboshed” when she broke her leg aged 11. “That was it – bang, done,” she says. “It was quite a significant injury. I had danced since I was four, so you can imagine the devastation.”
Having hung up her dancing shoes, Swan turned to the “brutal” sport of rowing, competing in the Irish Coastal Rowing Championships “long before it was in the Olympics”.
“It is a very competitive team sport,” she says. “High performance is very important in business nowadays. You have to build teams and have a performance goal. To be able to understand what it’s like when you don’t win, but to be able to get up and move forward.
“I rowed all over the island of Ireland. It really built my resilience. It wasn’t unknown to get an oar in the face when you were racing.”
Indeed, water and boats have been a big part of her life from day one. Her grandfather ran coal ships between Northern Ireland and Britain, and she worked for a number of ferry companies straight from school.
She describes a “love-hate relationship” with schooling where she wasn’t always the most studious. She had to work hard to achieve, which she says didn’t come naturally to her. “I got a real buzz out of the recognition whenever I did well though,” she says.
She left school in fifth year and went into further education, a pathway she passionately advocates for. She went on to study accountancy at university but realised after a couple of years that it was not where her future lay.
Having earlier completed a student placement with SeaLink, she went to work in Larne Harbour with P&O Ferrymasters in the transport office. Enjoying the work there, she resolved – against her father’s advice – to carve out a career in logistics and transport.
She worked her way up through the company over 18 years and became its interim managing director for freight, all while living in Larne and raising her family of two sons with her husband.
After that, Swan was poached by one of P&O’s competitors, Seatruck Ferries, where she spent five years, before finally deciding after 29 years in the industry that it was time for a change.
“I was spending four nights per week away in hotel rooms across many European destinations,” she says. “It sounds lovely, but it was absolutely awful. I had offers from other operators in the industry, but when you reach 50 you need to do something different.”
Swan was appointed managing director of Aircoach last year, which operates six routes connecting Dublin Airport with Dublin city centre and its suburbs, as well as non-stop express services connecting Dublin Airport with Cork, Belfast and Derry.
The company also provides all car park and shuttle bus services at the airport. It has a fleet of 61 coaches and 167 drivers, which Swan says is about seven short of where it should be. The bulk of the work is on the Dublin city centre routes with 90 drivers on that rotation.
The group, which is owned by UK operator First Bus, also has 59 drivers operating a fleet of 20 buses in and around the car parks, while there are 24 people working in its customer services division inside the airport.
While Swan says developmental plans for the business will have to wait until next year as it finds its feet again following recent challenges, she says a big issue for the company will be the transition to more sustainable energy and fuel.
“It is a question of what legacy we are going to leave the kids of the future from a sustainability perspective,” she says. “The availability of green assets in the coach market is not probably not as far advanced as it should be to reach the 2035 agenda.
“There is a lot of discussion around greenwashing. Saying we are taking 50 cars off the road because we are putting 50 people on a coach is not the way forward. We have an investment programme.
“At the minute, we don’t have long-range electric vehicles (EVs) available to us. We travel to Cork and Derry so we don’t have the distance on them. We have just ordered 10 new coaches for Belfast and Derry.
“We have 10 new coaches for Cork with toilet facilities. We are looking at our fleet in the airport to bring in EVs for the Dublin routes. The shorter city centre routes are absolutely ideal for EVs.
“We have 20 new EVs coming because we operate the car park in Dublin Airport. We will shortly be deploying EV vehicles on all of the car parks which will move us from 100 per cent diesel to 100 per cent EVs there within the next 12 months.”
The question of sustainability is one that is central to the 32 million passenger cap at Dublin Airport, which DAA boss Kenny Jacobs has warned will cost the Irish economy half a billion euro in lost tourist revenue next year.
“From a sustainability point of view, it is a difficult one,” says Swan. “From a business point of view, we would obviously like to see the cap lift because it would give us a greater number of customers.
“I understand the airlines’ concerns because they are now being capped themselves, but only about 4 per cent of customers arriving in the airport actually get on to a coach, so we are not being held back by the cap at the minute as we still have capacity available.
“But if we want to see more tourism and more people into Ireland, they are going to have seriously look at the cap, because development at Dublin Airport is only going to come with an easement of that. The two come hand in hand.
“The bigger question for us is around the electrification and the Irish infrastructure to support the airport. We’re not where we need to be. It would be good to see a robust strategic direction from the Government around that.”
This week saw the introduction of a ban on private cars and commercial vehicles travelling directly east or west along the Liffey at either side of O’Connell Bridge, in what was one of the most significant changes to Dublin city centre traffic since the introduction of the Luas.
The restrictions were the first step in the implementation of the Dublin city centre traffic plan, which is designed to end the dominance of the private car on Dublin city’s street by 2028 and “remove traffic that has no destination in the city”.
Swan says she doesn’t know yet what the impact will be on Aircoach, but that the company will “react” when it needs to. “If you look at London, you’ve got congestion zones,” she says. “You’ve got areas that you just can’t go into. Every city has got to look at it.
“We all have a drive to move customers away from cars and into multimodal methods of transport, be that the Luas, coaches, buses and so forth. We need a world that is fit for purpose for our kids.
“Undoubtedly there are going to be further restrictions into city centres because the infrastructure at the minute can’t cope.
“You don’t need to take many cars off the road to give a better flow through cities. It should have a positive impact on us on that front.”
Swan says the recent pilot strike at Aer Lingus “did have an impact”, but that the company was insulated from the worst of the damage as about 70 per cent of its customers come through Terminal One, which Aer Lingus doesn’t operate from.
“It’s a different type of customer that comes thought Terminal Two,” she says. “We expected to see a downward trend, but it wasn’t as acute as we had originally expected. We didn’t see a huge impact.”
Another major event at Dublin Airport was the global IT outage – blamed on a security update from US group CrowdStrike – last month, which hit companies across the world, from airlines to financial services and media groups, and caused mayhem for travellers.
“First Bus notified us immediately before we had actually seen any impact, which is part of the benefit of being part of a larger group. Our disruption was limited to ticket machines, but it was short term enough and we had processes to deal with it.”
Companies such as Aircoach are key cogs in the country’s tourism sector, which supports about 20,000 businesses in a small and open economy. Swan says there is a “fantastic opportunity” to grow the industry here if we can make it easier to get in and out of the city.
The riots in Dublin last year led to tens of millions of euro in damage and lost business. The pictures flashed around the world in what was a major blow to the city’s sense of itself as a mecca for entertainment, tourism and fun.
Swan points out that the rise of social unrest witnessed here recently is not confined to Ireland, but says it must not be allowed to become a fixture of life here.
“I grew up through the Troubles and I’ve seen the devastating impact it can have,” she says. “It is important for us as a nation that we remain extremely attractive for tourists. We can’t lose that attractiveness because of social issues that are arising.
“I was isolated from the Troubles where I grew up, but it impacted us all. I grew up in a fishing village that was very much mixed community, but I met people who were impacted directly and have seen the hurt it caused.
“I saw the impact on people and infrastructure any time there were bomb scares. I lived in a student house and a bomb went off in a police station not far away and a window came in. I know the unrest and the tension it creates in the community.”
For now though, Swan is looking ahead to November when she is due to become a grandmother for the first time. Her free time between now and then revolves around family and cooking.
“It’s my switch-off time from this role,” she says. “I’m not a baker, but my absolute passion is a Sunday lunch, so a good old roast – the whole thing – always with a good wine, but it doesn’t have to be expensive.”
CV
Name: Kim Swan
Age: 54
Job: Managing director of Aircoach
Family: Married with two grown-up children
Interests: Cooking, rowing, walking
Something you might expect: She loves meeting people
Something that might surprise: She can write backwards
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