We looked into the cost of hiring a coach bus for the day. $1,300.<\/p>\n
Multiply that by 5 and you can buy<\/em> a used coach bus. (Granted, they’re easily $200,000 new, but there are a ton of used ones, and they’re the type of things that are usually driven until 1,000,000 miles or so.)<\/p>\n Assume 200 miles. (This is actually way, way more than we need.) 8 miles to the gallon. (You may do better.) $3\/gallon. That’s $75 in fuel.<\/p>\n Assume you pay the driver very well: $20 an hour, and that we have the bus for 8 hours. (He surely makes less, and we don’t need 8 hours.) $160 in labor.<\/p>\n I want to start my own bus company. (More for being hired out for the day than anything than being a Greyhound \/ Fung Wah, though.) I think I could do it for a lot less.<\/p>\n Buy something like this<\/a>, spruce up the interior (carpeting?), and re-install the seats, and you’ve got one heck of a bus with 750,000 miles of life left. And, apparently, 100 gallons of fuel already in it…\u00a0 $10-15,000 buys a nice, complete bus.<\/p>\n $750 a day… Assuming $20,000 fixed costs, you break even after 26 days. You have variable costs (fuel, labor, insurance), too, but really, I think that if you could book the bus regularly<\/em>, you’d do well.<\/p>\n Oh, and there are lots of little “extras” you could do. Replace those huge old TVs<\/a> with a few LCDs. Probably under $1,000 total cost if you do it yourself? And, in lieu of showing a movie \/ TV, you could always do an airplane-style display of where you are or something… Or show ads! No direct value, but I think it’d raise the perceived “value” of the bus.<\/p>\n You could invest your profits into a budget limo<\/a> service. You compete in the taxi<\/em> market, not the limo market. If I had the choice in riding in a 12-year-old limo (after removing the garbage from the floor?!) or riding in a taxi, I’d pick the limo. Although I wager most of the costs there are variable costs: labor, insurance, maintenance (probably big on a really old American car?), etc. But really, you’re paying less than it’d cost to buy a used taxi. And this one<\/a> is even less!<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We looked into the cost of hiring a coach bus for the day. $1,300. Multiply that by 5 and you can buy a used coach bus. (Granted, they’re easily $200,000 new, but there are a ton of used ones, and … Continue reading