Its interesting how when anyone talks about golden ages its almost always in the past tense.

BBC 4 recently ran a programme about the golden age of coach hire - the post war, pre cheap foreign holiday era. We disagree at Momentum Coach Hire – we see the green agenda, austerity, an ageing populations and a soft pound combining to offer a revival to domestic travel in the UK. People in business often forsake the great opportunities in front of their eyes whilst lamenting nostalgically byegone times. We say the opportunity is in front of us as we speak.

Golden Ages however should never be forgotton when looking at our sports stars. They define our yesterdays and are particularly resonant in an age of austerity.

For those of us old enough – 40 somethings – to enjoy memories of childhood and youth here are some favorites. Ali v frasier, Borg v Conners, Ballesteros v St Andrews, Red Rum v Aintree, Porterfield v Leeds, Tardelli v Germany

So BAe is a manufacturer – that makes it a good Company right? But it makes products whose aim is to kill people?

It is ironic that whilst 3,000 job losses represent a personal tragedy for 3,000 families – is the world really a worse place with 3,000 fewer weapon makers?

Hedge funds are evil right? Even if they are giving us an early warning that our governments, banks and pension funds are squandering our money on Greek bonds or membership of the ERM?

So coach hire for school kids is good right? Well is it good that gas polluting coaches, drive (overweight) kids long distances from their homes in turn undermining the local school.

Many people i have known bemoan the demise of the mining industry in County Durham being replaced by ‘crappy’ call centre jobs. However i can’t remember the last time a call centre room collapsed killing a number of its staff.

These are complex and subjective issues but i am pleased an entire shadow cabinet of people who have never worked a single day in industry in their working lives are going to bring their great minds together to resolve this?

For those in coach hire we will have to content ourselves with the knowledge that if all coaches turn up on saturday safely and on time – that is a good day. If they are late and the toilet is blocked, that represents a bad day!

What struck us most over the summer was how clients in ’season industries’ pay more and get less.

As discussed on previous blogs we monitor customer feedback on our service levels rigorously! Our current average rating on some 1,700 reviews this year is 3.87 out of 5 for 2011 – which also represents 98.5% customer satisfaction.

However, when you look at the breakdown between peak and off peak our customers rate us in excess of 4 out of 5 during non peak but score us onaverage 17% during peak season. At the sametime coach prices accross the industry are 22% higher during the peak season.

So next time you are on a commuter train – squashed in amongst the other standing passengers – look around at the many customers accross many industries who accept less for more and accept it bacause its peak season.

It appears coach hire – as with other industries – does not get customers to shift the supply and demand equilibrium, but merely change the economic rent due to the operator.

So this begs the question – just how big a premium is required to change customer in peak coach hire season, or by corollary just how high a price would the market stomach in June and July.

For the good folk at Momentum Coach Hire this was surprising. The surprise is not that the cloud -aka the internet – is suddenly the accepted way forward. The surprise is that so many people are no coming out and stating it – News Flash Sunderland beat Leeds in 1973 FA Cup Final.

The MCH business model from day 1 has been that
we live in an interactive world and everyone from Home workers, to partners to suppliers to customers should all be working on the same interactive platforms.

Platforms need to be free to use (pay as you play models) and technology neutral. We believe this will increasingly lead to industry specific vertical market platforms with Momentum well placed in the UK coach hire market.

So what is so interesting at the moment?

Firstly the world seems to be angry at the moment – and where there is protest there is coach hire and MCH. At Momentum we are utilitarian and pragamtic – we will take any protest the Government deems to be legal. In recent months we have taken literally hundreds of coaches to EDL rallies, rallies against the EDL, Student protests, Unions against the Cuts protests, Libyan protests against Gaddafi, Egyptians against Mubarak and many many more. We may have to change our strap line from rent a coach to rant on a coach.

Meanwhile in the Happy Valley of the Momentum IT department we are working on a myriad of Apps for smart phones as we remain convinced that mobile will be the dominant platform of the future.

So anger and technology advances – interesting times indeed.

The simple answer is no one knows who will win nor do we know the new alternatives which will emerge. Fortunately unlike roulette we our not faced with a binary choice.

Here at Momentum we have unashamedly embraced search engines – both PPC and SEO, directory links and many other internet based channels.

We will continue to invest heavily in search engine activity having offshored part of this to India in 2010. We will also continue to support the likes of Bing, Yell and Yahoo as they attempt to resist the onward march of Google.

Twitter we have embraced for our supplier communities – with Operations and IT both having Twitter accounts.

Our Facebook strategy is client facing but on a segmented basis. An example being our wedding transport desk using Facebook to help develop our expertise, our focus and our communication on weddings.

At the same time we have a couple of pet projects we are running – to be announced soon – in the mobile space. This is perhaps Momentum coach Hires equivalent of a little bet on the green ball!

Anyone who works day to day in the service sector could have told you that something very strange happened in the two weeks in December when we had the bad weather -the Country basically stopped.

Momentum enjoyed year on year growth last year of 94%. Our growth in January this year was 74% in line with our budger for the year. However, our december year on year growth was a very modest (in comparasin) 39%.

Christams parties were cancelled, shopping trips were cancelled and people did not even bother hitting the phones for future trips.

At Momentum our resident pub economists could not believe how people just assumed the GDP figures would stay on forcast and asked was the weather induced collapse in the coach hire industry so unique? The clear answer we now have is NO it is not unique!

The good folk at Momentum are however very optimistic with the start to 2011. We see a national picture of renewed steady if unspectacular growth – weather permitting.

With that in mind Momentum has taken the decision to publish every single review (subject to customers right to opt out) every single rating a customer gives us. See www.momentumcoachhirereview.com.

So what has prompted this? Basically we have become bored with unregulated review sites who allow anonymous strangers (competition) to post reviews on Companies services they have never received. This creates a completely false impression of Companies – yes all service Companies have warts – but we are not all warts!

Everybody who books a trip with us gets send a rating request which asks for a mark out of 5 and offers a box for free text. So if you have not booked with us you dont get invited to comment.

Our commitment is that the only moderation is for personally offensive comments -but we will still leave the score even if we have to delete the comments. In the medium term we will publish a breakdown of scores by area/ vehicle type  and event type.

Meanwhile after years of rich men arguing that pre nup contracts should be recognised in the eyes of the law isn’t it a positive step that the (supreme) law courts have finally decided to embrace freely entered into legal contracts.

However, for equality watchers out there, how is it that - given 95% + of pre nups are entered into when the man is in the stronger financial position – the courts finally realise the injustice of disregarding freely entered into contracts when it is a rich woman who is being pursued by her ‘relatively’ impoverished husband?

Given that the highest courts in the land are supposed to dispense justice – neutral of colour, creed or sex- how did this case come to represent the dawn of a new reality?