Most bad island delivery arrangements are not badly run. They are badly ordered, and the fix costs nothing.
We are asked to quote for delivery runs most weeks, and a fair number of times the honest answer has been that the boat is fine and the timetable is wrong. Here is what we look at, and any supplier or council can do the same thing without hiring anybody.
Start with the hour, not the day. Every atoll has a good window and a bad one. The good one is before nine in the morning: it is cool, the sea is usually calmer, the receiving offices are open and the whole day is available to fix a problem. The bad one is the middle of the day, which is the hottest, and late afternoon, which lands cargo at a closed office and leaves it on a quay overnight. If you change nothing else, move your run earlier.
Then fix the drop order and publish it. A route where the order changes each week is a route where every customer has to send somebody to look at the quay repeatedly. Decide the order once, by who needs it earliest rather than by who complains loudest, write it down, and keep to it. Our circuits publish the order and it is the thing customers mention most.
Then count the trips honestly. Suppliers very often run three or four part empty trips a week because each island was arranged separately at a different time. Two full trips usually cost less, arrive more reliably, and are easier to crew. The reason nobody does it is that combining islands means telling one of them their day has changed.
Then decide what happens when somebody is late, and decide it in advance. If the run waits, it is not a timetable. We leave on the hour and put the late load on the next trip, and we tell the customer at the time. Every operator who tries to be kind about this ends up with a service that departs whenever and customers who cannot plan.
Then deal with the return leg. A run that only goes one way leaves every property storing empty crates, gas cylinders, returns and repairs. Build the collection into the same trip and the boat earns twice.
And finally, ask the receivers rather than the senders. The sender knows what left. Only the receiver knows what time it arrived, what state it was in, and how long somebody stood waiting. We spend a fortnight watching before we quote a run for exactly that reason, and about a quarter of the time what we recommend is not our boats at all.
