"michael adams" wrote:
wrote in message
...
Grauniad story:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2012...-company-sinks

- Not surprised at those prices - £95 a ticket for a trip up a scummy
-stinking ex-industrial river aka Lee.

snip

- So I'm not surprised that the water taxi's gone bust. But I wonder who
- was running the company and who the drivers were? I bet they were
- greedy speculators out for a quick buck and were not river-folk.

If by "river-folk" you mean ex lightermen and tugboat crews then no,
they would have had more sense to start with.

Only the other week there was the story of all the small traders who'd
laid out thousands on pitches in some Olympic Food Market and sold
hardly anything.

Like the people behind this, they were foolish enough to believe
marketing projections produced by the Olympics Marketing Bull****
Directorate. That and Local Council and British Waterways PR.
Rather than commissioning their own independent research. The market
traders were promised a passing trade of thousands of customers daily -
instead of just one or two, and matey here commissioned 15 specially built
vessels and was hoping to make 120 trips a day. With little it seems by
way of a back-up "legacy" plan.

I don't know the history of this but maybe the prices were cheaper
earlier on until they discovered very few people were interested
at any price.

No, the prices were always extraordinarily high. I tried to register for a
pre-Olympics trial ride, expecting the prices to be much lower, but they
never even responded. And it's long been known that ticket holders would
get free Travelcards, so I never managed to figure what the target market
was for these boats.