Coach Hire Booking are now providing executive minibus hire in the Manchester and North West of England areas. We are able to offer very competitive rates for our Executive 16 seater minibus.

This is a bizarre video of a lorry travelling down the motorway pushing a car sideways! We hope it's a fake - the driver of the car would have been quite erm.. nervous!

Coach hire prices are quite difficult to understand unless you are able to appreciate the complexities of coach hire. We regularly get queries about our coach hire prices. Often coach hire pricing, like many things is best explained with the aid of an example. 

Quite often people will book seats on coaches in a similar way to how they do on trains - they pay a price per seat. This is a fixed price, calculated by the coach company e.g. National Express, based on an average vehicle "load".  When booking a private hire coach, the pricing differs as there are many parameters included in the coach hire pricing. These include standard of vehicle, distance and length of time the coach is required as-well as any supplementary prices and of course seasonal adjustments.

If a coach company provides a regular service, for example for Away supporters they also take into account the volume of work they are receiving and as such reduce the cost accordingly. It makes sense - if you can have 20 coach hire jobs a season the coach operator will give a better coach hire price than just a single hire. 

As we provide coach operators corporate and private hire work throughout the year on a nationwide basis, we are able to negotiate better coach hire prices.  Our prompt payment initiatives ensure that the coach operators we use have a consistent and reliable source of income throughout the year.

You've no doubt heard the phrase "the customer is always right", and there is a valid argument that this is indeed the case. In the coach hire industry, you're not just dealing with the customer at the end of a phone or on email, you need to remember that there are many other customers behind the scenes travelling on the actual coach or minibus. We're privileged to work with excellent coach and minibus operators who all have the same respect and courtesy for the customers that we have. 

There was an incident the other day where one of our clients flights was delayed and was unable to contact us.  As we track all flights where we are doing an airport transfer we we able to seemlessly re-arrange the coach transportation to the new arrival time.  The customer was very thankful to us as he'd been concerned that he'd miss the airport transfer. It just shows that a bit of forward planning can save a heck of a lot of time in the long run - if we hadn't tracked the flight we would have potentially had to send the vehicle twice and also have the customers waiting around!

There's no getting away from it - even the coach and bus industry is not immune to political spin. Recently it was announced that First Bus Group were preferred bidder for the London 2012 Olympics.

Tessa Jowell, minister for the Olympics was quick to endorse the company saying: "As a company based in Aberdeen, this is yet another example of how businesses are benefitting from the London Olympic and Paralympic Games". So, the impression is that FirstGroup are a company based in Aberdeen, Scotland and the Olympics will bring benefit to that local area? Unfortunately, whilst FirstGroup are indeed based there, their operations stretches far into deepest darkest England: Indeed they are one of the largest bus operators in many local regions. 

Interestingly, one of the many tasks that the successful party will have is to manage and co-ordinate  the direct coach hire operations. If FirstGroup win, it is possible that they will be managing the coach hire services of their rivals Stagecoach and National Express.

Disclaimer: 

All respective companies trademarks acknowledged.

With the jump horse racing season fast approaching we're started to get lots of coach hire bookings for The Aintree Grand National, and the Cheltenham Gold Cup. If you are planning on going racing via coach travel it's vital that you pre-arrange coach parking at the racecourse - this is simple to do if you have prebooked tickets for a group of you travelling by coach.

Private Coach Hire is  a good alternative to using public transport such as the train and quite often it works out to be much cheaper and convenient. Visit Racecourse Express if you are interested in an Express Coach Service to Ayr Racecourse .

Be sure to arrange your coach hire quickly as availability for coach travel to these events quickly reduces and coach hire prices tend to increase.

Echoing our earlier similar blog entry last year about the Amphicoach, there is now the"amfibus", it is the latest wheeze by Britain's most famous busdriver, Brian Souter, the co-founder and chief executive of Stagecoach Group, one of the world's largest bus and railcompanies.

If it survives day two, it could becomeBritain's first timetabled amphibious bus service.

Souter believes the Clyde service could provea model for amphibious buses elsewhere in the UK. Stagecoach is confident theamfibus can navigate safely through the wash of boats and any other passengerferry which might yet replace the obsolete service.

The bus has been borrowed from its owners, theDutch waterborne tour operator Splashtours, which is planning to run a serviceon Rotterdam's Maas river. Steve Stewart, head of communications forStagecoach, is confident that passengers will have no need of seasicknesstablets on the amfibus's 200-metre trip over the Clyde. At £700,000, theamfibus is roughly three times the price of a standard passenger coach. Unfortunately, Coach Hire Booking won't be offering any similar services in the near future!

More information below 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/video/2010/feb/08/amphibus-stagecoach-river-clyde 

Long time no post.. It's been an incredibly busy 6 months with Coach Hire Booking going from strength to strength. We've had the pleasure of meeting a number of coach operators who we've been dealing with over the years to let us further build on the existing relationships we have.

The winter, has seen some challenging weather to deal with but we're pleased to say that none of our services were affected - due in a large part to the excellent efforts of our coach operators.  Many of them were working late into the night and up early in the morning to clear yards of the snow.

We're already experiencing a surge of enquiries for 2010 so we expect marginal increases in price this year as demand outstrips supply.

Coach Hire Booking are now in a position to exclusively offer a choice of a 8 seater VIP minibus and a 16 seater executive minibus - these are available throughout the UK.