As we enter 2026 I cannot help but feel that the coach industry seems to continue suffering from the same problems year after year. We still have parking problems in London, we still need to raise our game when it comes to professionalism, and we still have problems with delays to parts and the supply of coaches.
While we try to provide a better service than most, providing two crew members on virtually every service we run, with well trained and well paid drivers, the issue we have, like others, is that of keeping up with wages to attract the right staff.
In the older days, a driver would be happy to go out on tour because it would be part of his lifestyle. It was a nice way of life. Now regulations are so strict, it has become a chore to go away on long trips for the salaries being paid and the time constraints. Meanwhile the requirements for days off while on domestic touring continue to cause problems with staffing, all because we still haven’t changed back to a 12-day system.
Days off when drivers are on tour is not a happy place to be and nobody seems to have noticed that. Here in the UK we cannot work more than six days while on domestic tours. We are the only industry that cannot do round tours as a result. For those on a seven-day holiday, you cannot do seven days. It doesn’t make sense. Imagine asking the captain of a cruise ship to take a day off while on a voyage!
To highlight how ridiculous this system is: a bus driver in London, for example, can drive for 13 days. The drivers’ hours rules even treat scheduled coach service drivers the same as tour drivers, where those drivers may only work one hour a day.
The whole system is diabolical, and these regulations don’t have to be as restrictive as they are. We can go abroad and work for 12 days now under EU drivers’ hours rules, but in the UK we cannot. When we left the EU, we might have been able to rewrite this. The advantage we have had no longer applies.
Touring is different from all other driving methods, but nobody seems to have clocked this or is doing anything to acknowledge it. The public might never understand, but this is a crisis. The rules are not geared for the tourism industry and we are being held back as a result.
But who is surprised? In London now, there is no central area we can park without it costing a fortune or being unusable. Certain coach parks in London are now prohibitively expensive or unfit for purpose, and yet during the Christmas market, usable space for coach parking at Hyde Park will be taken up by the likes of a funfair. That is a space with plenty of room, where parking rates could be made to be reasonable, and that would save coach operators needing to have vehicles driving through the rest of the city looking for spaces.
This has been ongoing for years, and again, there is no thought for coach tourism — as always, the cities want the thousands of passengers coaches bring, but not the coaches.
I fear the coach industry will continue to be looked upon as a second-rate sector unless someone gets serious and tries to do something about these issues.
Dave Parry
Cheslyn Hay
