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FMD crisis claims new victim: Boston-Cork air link

February 16, 2011

By Staff Reporter

By Ray O’Hanlon

The foot-and-mouth crisis in Ireland has claimed another victim: the planned transAtlantic air link to Cork this summer.

Boston-based Evergreen Travel was set to launch a charter service from Logan airport to Cork beginning on June 17.

But a collapse in advance bookings due to foot-and-mouth disease forced Evergreen to put Cork on the long finger.

"We were doing good business up until early March but then we had a flood of cancellations because of the disease. The number of cancellations was phenomenal," said Evergreen’s owner, Mike Landers.

"It doesn’t take much of this to beat the hell out of you and we couldn’t operate at a loss."

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The Boston-to-Cork connection had prompted a lot of excitement in the city as Cork Airport has been attempting to attract transAtlantic business for many years.

According to Landers, once the Cork plan had been ditched, he had to consider another problem. What to do with those who had booked but not canceled?

And that resulted in a second surprise for Landers, a native of Tralee, Co. Kerry, who has been running Evergreen for more than 16 years.

"I contacted Bert Accomando, president of Sceptre Tours in New York in an effort to have those customers covered," Landers said. "He said that he would cover them"

But Accomando went further. He made an offer to buy out Evergreen, which runs two offices in the Boston area, one in West Roxbury, the other in Brighton. Landers accepted.

Evergreen will continue to trade under its own name but will now offer Sceptre’s wide range of tours and travel packages to Ireland. And while Evergreen’s planned Cork service was going to avail of the El-Al subsidiary, North American Airlines, the company will now be selling Air Lingus tickets instead.

"One minute it was all gloom and the next we were smiling from ear to ear," Landers said.

"Instead of selling tickets for one flight a week, we’ll be selling tickets for 14 flights and we’ll now be selling a great product."

Landers said that any future link to Cork was now a decision for Sceptre.

"The route certainly would have worked without the hoof and mouth," said Lander, using the alternative name for foot and mouth.

"We’ve been trying to educate people about it, telling them that right now there’s actually none of it in the Republic of Ireland and that’s the sad thing about it."

Accomando, whose Long Island-based company previously bought out Round Tower Travel in Chicago — a move seen as yet another sign of consolidation in the travel industry — released a statement saying that Sceptre was "thrilled" to be teaming up with Evergreen.

The statement described the new relationship between the two companies as a "merger."

"We now have a very strong presence in Boston," Accomando said in the statement.

Accomando could not be reached for further comment by presstime. He was on vacation — in foot-and-mouth-free Italy.

In Cork, meanwhile, the culling of the anticipated link with Boston has been just one more bombshell in a year that is not shaping up well in terms of tourist numbers.

"It’s a big loss. They had done a load of work clearing earth and creating a new apron to accommodate the size of aircraft that would have flown the Atlantic," said Frank Slater, managing director of Allied Forwarding, an air freight company based at the city’s airport.

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