BC Ferries says eliminating the free fares for seniors will keep fare costs down

BC Ferries says it was necessary to eliminate the free fares for seniors in order to keep the overall costs of fares down.

Several measures were announced on Monday, including reducing services on minor routes, and a pilot project to add slot machines on board the Swartz Bay to Tsawwassen run.

READ MORE: Full list of routes affected by BC Ferries changes, coming April 2014

Mike Corrigan, BC Ferries president and CEO spoke on the Global BC Morning News and says steps needed to be taken to save $19 million overall.

“It was actually the government’s decision to reduce the, or eliminate the free fares for seniors and charge 50 per cent going forward,” he says. “The idea is that we would actually be able to allocate the revenues from that to BC Ferries and we would be able to use that to keep our costs down and keep fares down going forward.”

Seniors always had to pay for their vehicle travel, it was only their ticket that was free from Monday to Thursday.

Former employees and current employees of BC Ferries do not have to pay to ride the vessels, but Corrigan says if they were made to pay it wouldn’t save any money anyway.

“Well there would be no savings because basically employees travel on our ferries, and our ferries are at 50 per cent capacity utilization, which means there’s really no additional cost to carry our employees,” he says, “and in fact we see it as a huge benefit of giving our employees travel passes because they’re the ambassadors of the company, it’s a big employee engagement program for us, it helps us operate more safety, it gets them more involved in the business, and it’s something that probably goes back to the days of W.A.C Bennett.”

In an effort to generate some funds, gaming might be introduced on major routes as a possible revenue source.

The pilot project to introduce slot machines would be implemented on BC Ferries’ busiest route between Swartz Bay and Tsawwassen, and if successful, BC Ferries says gaming revenue would help reduce the pressure on fares.

“At this point in time it’s only a proposal,” says Corrigan. “It’s proposed for our major route between Swartz Bay and Tsawwassen, we have about five millions passengers per year but there’s a lot of work ahead that has to be done before this can be implemented.”

Corrigan says they do get a lot of revenue from their food and beverage services and gift shop already, but they do not want to add more food and beverage services to the smaller routes, as the cost of labour would outweigh the benefits.