Ferry firm offers a week's free trips

Ferry company Fullers and connecting bus operators are offering Aucklanders a lift out of the recessionary blues with a week's free travel over the next month on various routes.

Would-be passengers registering with the Auckland Regional Transport Authority are sent tickets from which they nominate which calendar week they wish to travel free, from a range of four weeks.

The offer applies between Monday and September 27 to the Half Moon Bay, Devonport, Stanley Bay, Birkenhead, Bayswater and Northcote Pt ferry services.

It also covers feeder buses operated by the NZ Bus, Ritchies, Birkenhead Transport, and Howick and Eastern companies.

Authority communications manager Sharon Hunter said the offer was being made at no financial cost to her organisation, although it was co-ordinating registrations in a bid to lift the profile of combined bus and ferry transport.

"We are saying to people: Try it and you may like it."

About 2000 applications for free passes had been received so far.

The promotion was aimed at getting Aucklanders back on the water after a period of sluggish demand for ferry transport.

Fullers chief executive Doug Hudson said the offer followed declining patronage on one or two routes, such as Bayswater-Auckland, in the face of the recession and associated job losses among some commuters.

He was confident his ferries would have enough spare capacity to cope with all takers, although Fullers would decide over the weekend whether to put a spare vessel on standby for Monday in case of heavy demand.

Although transport authority figures show that ferry patronage for June was 3.2 per cent higher than for the same month last year, boardings for the 2008-09 financial year slipped by 0.1 per cent to about 4.38 million.

That was at a time when Auckland's overall public transport patronage rose 7.7 per cent to 56.6 million trips.

www.maxx.co.nz/freeferry