THE operators of the Ardrossan to Brodick Ferry are changing the way customers will be alerted to disrupted services.

An additional service status of yellow is being added to the existing green, amber and red categories on their website to give passengers clearer information about potential disruption from April 11.

CalMac’s director of operations, Drew Collier, said: “We asked the public what we could do to make their journey easier in the face of weather disruption and the overwhelming response was that they wanted more information,”

“Feedback told us that the existing amber alert covered too broad a range of situations and caused confusion.

“This new yellow alert now separates out potential disruption from actual disruption on a route.

“We are committed to improving the services we offer, and listening and responding to our customers needs plays a big part in this.

“This change comes on the back of the introduction of a dedicated twitter service updates account which, since it started has sent out 36,000 tweets helping our customers keep up to date with timetable changes.

“Weather on the west coast of Scotland will always be a challenge so giving customers as much accurate, up to date information as possible will allow them to plan their journey to take account of all eventualities.”

The yellow alert will be used to tell customers to remain aware and check for updates, as there is a possibility of disruption.

Amber alerts will now be used to inform customers that one or more sailings are disrupted.

The red alert will continue to be used to indicate when all sailings on a route are cancelled for the remainder of the day.