Success Stories - Sarah Owen's Story
SARAH OWENS, Treasurer and membership secretary of the North West Balloon and Airship Club tells of her experiences with BDS fuels
Our first connections with BDS
We’re known as the North West Balloon and Airship Club (NWBAC); we’ve been going for about 28 years. We have around 100 members now, obviously most of them are still in the north-west but we do have members all over the UK.
When we go flying, BDS provides the gas to refuel our cylinders for the balloons. I think the connection with BDS started in the first place because we had a meet in Kirby Lonsdale and in Coniston and they were a local gas supplier. But then we also started to meet further a-field in Stoke-on-Trent, Macclesfield and Burnley. BDS agreed to come to those meets too so that we always had gas. Since then we’ve used them for every meet we’ve been to. If we’re in the area, we go to their yard near Kirby Lonsdale and one of their staff fuels up for us, or if it’s somewhere else they bring the tanker or a ‘skid’ which is like our own small tank, and we can fuel ourselves.
‘We take BDS wherever we go’
Now, wherever we meet we ask BDS to supply us with gas. We know the people, we know they’re reliable, we don’t have to search high and low for different suppliers in every other area we go to – which could be a real pain. Another supplier approached us when we had a meet in Macclesfield – we’d never even thought about contacting a different supplier. We use BDS all the time. They’re very friendly, very helpful, they always sort things out for you. When you ring up, if they don’t know the answer to your question they say ‘we’ll ring you back’ and they always do!
The tanker drivers
Over the years we’ve got to know some of the drivers, Sam and Colin. One of the drivers, Colin used to come regularly – so much so he actually joined the club! He and his wife used to sit and wait in our caravan and have a cup of tea while they fuelled up. He used to say, ‘Don’t worry if you’re late back; I’ll wait for you’. He was very accommodating and joined in with everyone.Improvements
BDS are small and friendly but they’re forward-thinking too. As a company, they’re always looking for ways to improve – we were having a bit of a problem in the time it took to fill up from one of the skids. BDS came up with a great idea of introducing a manifold system so that you could fill up more than one tank at once – this make the process much quicker for us.‘We wouldn’t think to ring anybody else’
BDS are competitive on price but to be honest, price is not the main reason we’re with them. We’ve used them for that long, and we know they’ll provide us with the service we need, so we just automatically contact them. It doesn’t occur to us to ring anyone else. If they ever let us down, we’d be stuck. And so would our members. Fortunately we’ve never had that problem. Always knowing you’ll have the gas there is one less thing to worry about. If we need to change anything, because of the weather for example, we try to give them as much notice as we can. But they’re very flexible; it’s no great panic even if we give them short notice.
They’ve probably already got us in the diary for next year…we wouldn’t use anyone else.
