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!

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.

Long time no blog. It's been an incredibly busy time for us here at coach hire booking, arranging coach hire for many of the festivals and sports events that are happening over the summer.

We're proud to be supplying coach hire to Glastonbury, V-Festival and many other festivals.   Due to the higher demand for coach hire in the summer, prices do rise so if you are planning on leaving the coach booking to the last minute, you may end up paying more that you would do by booking early.

Yesterday we were inundated with phone calls and requests for customers wishing to travel to Wembley to watch Everton play in the 2009 FA Cup Semi Finals after Everton beat Middlesbrough 2-1. As we deal with literally hundreds of coach operators on a monthly basis we have a unique capability within the coach hire market of understanding the availability of coach hire and the prices being commanded by coach operators.  Understandably when there is a massive demand for a limited resource (coaches), the price tends to increase - this is seen regularly for large sporting events, and music festivals where coach hire is used to transport large numbers of passengers.

Unfortunately many customers are not aware that prices can fluctuate so rapidly and as such can get rather animated on the phone as was the case on a few occasions yesterday. "Jumping on the band wagon" was a phrase used on a number of times when we explained coach hire prices had increased significantly - unfortunately we can not dictate prices that coach operators want for work, nor would we want to.  We have excellent relationships with coach operators througout the country which means we are able to ask for much cheaper coach prices than would normally be the case.

In July 2008, the city of London introduced the Low Emission Zone. The Low Emission Zone (LEZ) specifically affects older diesel-engined lorries, buses, coaches, large vans  and minibuses having over 8 seats.  Currently, all buses and coaches that have EURO III engines meet the LEZ standard. This is set to change in 2012 when vehicles must have engines meeting the EURO IV standard.

Coach operators that have coaches that are not EURO III compliant need to pay a £200 per day surcharge for entering the LEZ. Typically these are vehicles that are 10 years old or more, but quite often these are still coaches that are well maintained and useable.  The £200 LEZ charge is generally passed on to the passengers which can mean a 40% increase in price for visiting London by coach.  This means that passengers wishing to travel to London by coach need to either pay a premium on the quality of the coach or pay for the LEZ charge. Understandably, this may have an effect on the number of tourists visiting London by coach from other areas of the country.

Another potential impact of this policy is that it encourages coach hire companies to operate more in their own locality, as the potentially more lucrative market for coach trips to London will have reduced.

As part of our new website, we've put together some prices and associated information for coach parking prices for major airports, central London etc.  We did this because we werent able to find all this information in one place and so thought it would be quite useful to provide it.

We'll be publishing the information on our new coach hire website, but in the mean time here are the coach parking prices that we've got together so far:

One of the interesting aspects of providing managed coach hire is that every coach hire job we do is different. Its easy to assume that organising a coach trip is simple and on most routine jobs this is the case. However, where an itinerary becomes complicated or unusual with lots of co-ordination much more planning is required.  Its very important for clients to provide us with all the details of the day especially with regards to location. Recently we had a job that required a double decker coach to  pickup at a luxury hotel.

The VIP client had specified that the double decker coach was to pick up at the door of the hotel which was approached via a narrow lane. We were assured that the access to the hotel would be suitable for a large coach, but unfortunately this was not the case - the entrance was blocked by a number of concrete blocks.

Luckily, we were able to notify the clients of the problem and to let them know in good time so that their planned coach journey would not be  delayed.

Although we put in every effort to assure that the coach hire goes as smoothly as possible there are occasions where there are problems such as this, so its very important that the trip organiser is aware of potential issues such as these. Of course, sometimes these things just happen and this just makes it a little bit more interesting and memorable!