“A Cup for Life” – no it is NOT an early April Fools!

Waterford City was last week left shell-shocked, by the terrible news that the Waterford to London Luton air route will yet again be pulled, cancelled and withdrawn, from our regional airport. This now means that the regional airport has once again been left floundering in a desperate search of yet another European carrier to fill this cavernous void.

The BIG question is, “Is there another carrier out there?”

It is a glaring fact, that the very fast, traffic light free M9 has made it so much easier to travel north, towards all things Dublin, and the cheap flight options which this brings. There are very few people, south of the M7 corridor, actually travelling back down the M9, towards Waterford airport and all things “Sunny South East”!

If you were in any way up to speed with this carrier’s business profile, you will have known that they have been in financial difficulties for some time now. With mounting, unsustainable losses, it was realistically only a matter of time before the inevitable happened and the business effectively ceased trading.

This bitter pill to swallow was, I am sure, discussed at last week’s full Council Plenary meeting. However I was made aware, via a media twitcher, that in the midst of yet another crisis that will adversely affect our FDI profiling and the economic stability of the city, county and region in general, some of our Councillors put forward an implausible motion (please note this motion was not passed) calling on our patchwork quilt of a Government to, and wait for it, as you are reading this correctly;

“Ban take-away coffee cups, asking the Government to introduce some sort of “Cup for Life” plan, similar to the plastic bag scheme!” Because as we all know a cup is not just for Christmas it should be for life!

Are we really going to ask all our citizens and visitors alike to carry a mug from home or a “Cup for Life” around with them whilst in work or at play? NO!!!!!

Can you imagine in 2017, tourists coming to Waterford after a weary trip down from “Up North” (the regional airport having failed to receive Government funding to extend the runway and thus attract a viable carrier). Are said tourists, expected to wander around the City Centre and dropping into one of our excellent coffee shops only to be met by someone saying to them, “I can’t serve you coffee unless you’ve brought your own cup!”

Now think this through to it’s obvious conclusion. Coffee shops could sell a “cup for life” to the customers but that might add another €3 or €4 to the price of a coffee and besides when you are on holiday the very last things you want to be looking after is a bloody coffee cup for life!!!!!!

The customer is without doubt going to think they have arrived in a banana republic, that has clearly lost all sense of reality.

Imagine yourself on holiday, in the sunny south of Spain, and you are presented with the same scenario by the tanned smouldering barista? The answer would be “Feck Off!” or at least words similar to this phrase, but maybe with a different vowel here and there! You would laugh and walk away never to return to that coffee emporium again. Or better still you would present the barista with a bucket, telling him this is your Cup for Life, and asking him to fill it to the brim, with his expensive coffee!

How do the Councillors propose controlling portion size? How do you stop insurance claims from people burning themselves? All current take away coffee cups tell you, “this cup contains hot liquid” and who is going to get THAT printed on the family’s finest bone china?

Clearly, then some of our Councillors have far too much time on their hands. Should they not be getting on with the business of making Waterford an economic powerhouse?

“A Cup for Life” – don’t make me laugh!

Time to paint the City Purple!

This weekend will be the official launch of the Purple Flag accreditation for Waterford City. But before I go on to write about the importance of this promotional project I must comment on the return of flights from Waterford City to, in particular, London Luton.

As you read this article we will have already seen dozens of flights take off and land between Waterford City and London Luton. It is great news to see VLM commit to the reinstatement of flights between Waterford City and London Luton. Luton is around 30 minutes from London St.Pancras International (which incidentally was the station used for the Harry Potter films) and it is then just a short tube ride from the very heart of London City. The timetable is now even more user friendly as you can depart Waterford City at 07:30 and return on the evening flight from Luton at 18:40. This of course does mean that you can pop over to London for a quick business meeting and be home at a reasonable time that evening. In addition we must also take into account that the airport is literally on our doorstep and the travel time back home from the airport is inevitably under 1 hour and that sort of convenience is worth its weight in gold after a long day.

We must also remember that it was only last December, at the final City Council meeting of 2014, that it was announced that the flights operated by BMI would cease in 2015 and for the staff of the airport to turn this negative around to this week’s huge positive news takes an awful lot of time, work and effort. So we must show our support for Waterford Airport and book our flights whenever possible out from Waterford Airport.

Is it the right time to paint the City Purple! Well the answer is of course a big fat YES.

As a Purple Flag designated City we can open a world of possibilities to create a City that will be appealing to new customers base and a whole new audience. Like the Blue Flag Beach accreditation the Purple Flag award for Cities and Towns will deliver certain standards for cleanliness, street lighting, safety, communication, nightlife, and so on. This a truly a collaborative effort that has been coordinated through the City Centre Management Group (CCMG) and supported by the Council, Waterford Business Group, the Garda, City Businesses and a wide range of stakeholders. It is a real chance to once and for all make the City Centre a vibrant destination once again.

And yes there are still issues around the retail mix, concerns around safety, the uniformity of late night opening hours, the cost of car parking...but this Purple Flag is a starting point from where we can ALL drive the City forward with a positive message. We need to talk up the City’s offering in order to attract new retailers, attract a greater variety of late night offerings, encourage a late night cafe culture (as we see across the whole of Europe) and above all we need to get our citizens back into the City Centre to start loving our City once again.

The brand that is Waterford City needs to regenerate itself and everyone must become that Brand Ambassador the City so badly needs. We all have our part to play and we all need to accentuate the positives rather than the negatives. And if you feel that there are issues, come up with a solution and do not just come forward with a complaint that can be posted anonymously across the ever widening range of social media channels. If you can contribute in a positive way then do just that.

The importance of the Purple Flag launch cannot be over emphasised and every business within the Purple Flag designated zone must do their bit to get the message out to their customers and the citizen of Waterford.

Yet getting this message out seems to have had varying degrees of success. I know that the Waterford Business Group have held an information evening and the Council did likewise yet the level of awareness is much less than it should be from a business point of view. How can you expect members of the public to be aware of the messaging if the businesses delivering that message are not clear themselves?

Clarity of communication messaging is something many business and organisation overlook or simply get wrong time and time again. When dealing with a stakeholder group the clarity of messaging becomes even more important and just because the people involved in a project are clear of the messaging it does not follow that everyone else “gets the messaging!”

I was very conscious at the start of this week that many of the businesses in the very heart of the Purple Flag area were not aware of the launch, were not aware of the messaging, were not aware of how they were to promote the launch weekend etc etc. It was clear that Purple Flag businesses have been visited but to what extent was there a conversation taking place with the business to enthuse them to get involved. I am yet to be convinced that enough time was spent delivering this messaging!

To remedy the lack of engagement the Waterford Business Group have taken it upon themselves to get out and “pound the street of the City Centre” and deliver some very striking purple belly posters to all the City Centre businesses asking them to give a Purple Flag offering for the launch weekend. You should be able to see A3 purple posters displayed in many shop windows this weekend promoting a Purple Flag offer or just recognising that the Purple Flag launch is taking place.

The communicating of messaging by getting bodies on the ground is without doubt the most effective way and is often the only way of delivering clarity of messaging. To see the human face of a promotion will undoubtedly get more buy-in and will also make the launch of the Purple Flag more personal.

 

So well done to Fly VLM and the Waterford Business Group for delivering more good news for the City, the County and the wider South East region.

Now we just need YOU, the people of Waterford, to support the launch, so make a deliberate effort to come into the City Centre this weekend and seek out the Purple Flag offerings. 

The wearing of Purple is of course optional.