The 2012 London Olympics promises to bring a great number of opportunities to London and the United Kingdom. With the opportunities the Olympics bring, Coach Hire Booking also recognize there will be challenges, particularly with regard to the capacity of public transport. 

The Olympic Delivery Authority has designated an Olympic Route Network (ORN); a network of major roads throughout London that will act as conduits for Olympic participants, staff and media. When engaged, the ORN will mean the roads will be closed for public use – something that is likely to be in place hours at a time.

With 10% of spectators expecting to use bus services, this amounts to an additional 900,000 passengers that will need accommodating on public transport. In addition to this, 21300 Media personnel will be transported daily using further dedicated bus services. It is estimated that almost 5000 further high capacity vehicles will be required throughout the Olympic Games the majority needing to cater for some 15-20% of passengers having specific access needs best suited to low access service buses.

It is possible that the London 2012 Olympics will create a void of coach and minibus availability in other areas of the UK and as such have an inflationary effect on coach hire prices.

In 1850, 2 brothers set up a cotton trading company inAlabama. This soon expanding into trading other commodities and over the subsequent years the company was one of the first to trade in share issues.Continued growth in the 20^th Century saw the company emerge as one ofthe leading investment banks turning over $19.2 billion at its peak.

Following in the trend of other investment banks, thecompany invested in sub-prime mortgages – those of poor quality and high risk. Eventually all confidence in the investment banks disintegrated as it was unclear just how many high risk, poor quality loans were tied to each investment bank. The company, Lehman Brothers, which was over 150 years old, filed for bankruptcy in September 2008.

It can be argued that the failure of Lehman Brothers was due to an increased reliance on poor quality, high risk trading.

What significance does this have in the coach hire industry? Due to the current economic climate, more and more customers are requesting “cheap coach hire”.  Coaches are assets run by businesses – they have the associated running costs and overheads and in order for the coach operator to stay in business they have a minimum charge that they need to meet.  If customers insist on lower prices, the coach operators have less incentive to reinvest in quality vehicles,as well as maintaining high standards in their staff and drivers.  Coach operators employ hundreds including cleaners, maintenance staff as well as office staff all of which need wages paying.

With reduced investment comes poor quality vehicles and eventually business failure as the coach operator struggles to make ends meet. Perhaps it’s time for people to appreciate that quality of service needn’t come at a prohibitive cost and that by paying a fair price all parties can benefit in the long run.

Coach Hire Booking are delighted that Michael Harris has decided to join the team as Transport Manager. Michael has spent many successful years as transport manager at Classic Coaches in the North East of England.  Michael brings with him valuable knowledge and experience in the transport sector and further enhances the talent and commitment to quality at Coach Hire Booking.

Due to continued growth, Coach Hire Booking require new and existing coach and minibus operators to join us. We provide high quality work, the best payment terms in the industry and prefer to work with coach operators as a partnership.

With many corporate contracts in place throughout the country, we are able to provide regular quality work to coach operators able to demonstrate the quality and professionalism that is required with this type of work. We also provide a large variety of private hire work ranging from day trips, school visits or trips abroad.

Contact us now for further details.

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.

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. 

We're not sure how this Amphibious Coach would cope on a coach trip from Dover to Calais, but it certainly looks a good idea on paper. Dubbed as the worlds first true amphibious passenger coach it has been designed and built to stringent EU regulation. The cost of each coach is a cool £280,000...