There’s ‘bover with the Hover’ today (Tuesday), as the service came to a halt at around 9.30am.
Passengers were told the suspension was due to ‘technical reasons’ on one of their craft. In usual circumstances, there are two craft in service and the crossings would have switched to a shuttle service.
However, the Freedom 90 craft was taken out of service at the end of last month after a ‘foreign body’ got caught in the propeller.
Update 3.34pm
Latest update
Our service is suspended and our next update will at 2000 today.
— Hovertravel Ltd (@HovertravelLtd) July 14, 2015
Update 2.33pm
The service remains suspended.
Neil Chapman, managing director at Hovertravel, explains the compensation offer for passengers,
“With regard to today’s service cancellation we have put several measures in place to help our customers. We are transferring passengers to the Wightlink catamaran service at our cost, with Hovertravel staff at the Ryde Pier entrance and Pier head to offer assistance and facilitate Hovertravel passengers. There will be a Hoverbus concierge travelling on the Hoverbus for the duration of our cancellation to assist our customers.”
He went on to say,
“Hovertravel has taken the radically innovative decision to announce an unique form of compensation for its customers. For every day Hovertravel has operated its revised one craft timetable, it will be offering free travel in compensation.
“As soon as Island Express was taken out of service this morning we convened an emergency customer service meeting. Although plans to compensate our customers were being considered, today’s service suspension was the trigger for us to apologise with an enhanced compensation offer. Hovertravel is a customer focussed business and we care deeply about the inconvenience we may have caused our passengers. We did not want to simply wait for our customers to complain but instead we wanted to be proactive with an offer of free travel.”
Hovertravel will be publishing details of how to claim your free travel on Friday 17 July at 0900 on its Website.
Article edits
Updates from Hovertravel added.
Image: Eastleighbusman under CC BY 2.0
