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Day Tours with The English Bus: From London to Stonehenge, Bath & more · UK Travel Planning

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the UK Travel Planning Podcast.
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: Your host is the founder of the UK Travel Planning website, Tracey Collins.
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: In this podcast, Tracey shares destination guides, travel tips and itinerary ideas, as well as interviews with a variety of guests who share their knowledge and experience of UK travel to help you plan your perfect UK vacation.
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: Join us as we explore the UK from cosmopolitan cities to quaint villages, from historic castles to beautiful islands, and from the picturesque countryside to seaside towns.
• 0:42
  Speaker 2: Welcome to episode 109 of the UK Travel Planning Podcast.
• 0:46
  Speaker 2: This week I'm very excited to welcome guest Chris Horsie from the English Bus, which is and I've been checking this out on I know that you are the number one small group tour operator doing small group day tours from out of London.
• 1:01
  Speaker 2: Is that correct, chris?
• 1:04
  Speaker 3: Well, in terms of being the highest rated, yes, absolutely, we are the highest rated tour company doing tours, operating tours out of London.
• 1:11
  Speaker 2: So yes, Excellent, so that's fantastic.
• 1:13
  Speaker 2: And you have been for a number of years now, haven't you?
• 1:17
  Speaker 3: Well, we've been going for about 15 years now, but I'd say we've been kind of top of the charts for maybe 11, 12 years and hopefully we stay that way for another 11 or 12 years.
• 1:31
  Speaker 2: That's fantastic.
• 1:31
  Speaker 2: So we're very excited that we have partnered with you guys and we've been talking about you in our Facebook group and it's fantastic to have you come on to the podcast to talk all about the English Boss and the tours that you offer out of London.
• 1:43
  Speaker 2: So would you like to introduce yourself, Chris, and tell us a little bit about who you are, what you do and about the English bus?
• 1:51
  Speaker 3: Sure, so my name is Chris Horsey.
• 1:54
  Speaker 3: I set up the English bus back in 2009.
• 1:58
  Speaker 3: I had a past career in teaching English as a foreign language and I lived in Japan teaching for a while and I taught in London for a number of years and I got kind of fed up with the classroom environment and I decided to expand the opportunities for my students to practice their English and study English and I started running tours for foreign language students studying English in London and out of London and the feedback was fantastic.
• 2:27
  Speaker 3: They absolutely loved the experiences, and so I kind of opened up my market to not just those studying English, but foreign visitors, tourists, sightseers coming to the UK and to my surprise, I had huge, huge demand from Australians, from Americans, from Canadians, from all sorts of markets that I didn't really anticipate having demand from, and the business has sort of morphed into what it is today.
• 3:00
  Speaker 3: So you know, now we focus on international tourists coming to the UK for two weeks who want to go out and see some of the countryside out of Europe.
• 3:09
  Speaker 3: So that's a brief kind of history of the business.
• 3:12
  Speaker 3: I myself am a tour guide, so when I founded the business it was me, on my own, I was guiding, I was selling, I was marketing, I was cleaning.
• 3:22
  Speaker 3: I was doing everything.
• 3:23
  Speaker 3: Now we have a small team of tour guides who do the vast majority of the guiding, I do step in now and again and I train on new guides where necessary.
• 3:35
  Speaker 3: But nowadays, my efforts are mainly focused in the office and supporting that team of tour guides and doing the sales and marketing etc.
• 3:44
  Speaker 3: But I'm very ably supported by my wife, Jen, who is my fellow co-director.
• 3:51
  Speaker 3: Jen runs the office, she looks after all the bookings and she does all the complicated logistical stuff that I'm not so good at.
• 4:03
  Speaker 3: So we share tasks pretty equally and I think we've got a good balance between us.
• 4:09
  Speaker 2: Excellent.
• 4:10
  Speaker 2: Well, it sounds like you complement each other with the various skills, which I guess is really important when you have a business for sure.
• 4:15
  Speaker 2: So let's talk about some of the small group options that you have from London, and I think it's important to kind of stress that your tours actually leave from London.
• 4:25
  Speaker 2: So this is really helpful as well.
• 4:27
  Speaker 2: For those of you who are listening and thinking, you know, I want to do a small group tour.
• 4:31
  Speaker 2: I'm really interested, but I don't really fancy getting on a train and going somewhere.
• 4:35
  Speaker 2: I actually just want to be picked up in London and go somewhere, and that's what Chris's company does.
• 4:39
  Speaker 2: So that's really good.
• 4:40
  Speaker 2: So let's talk about some of the tours that you offer, chris, and the destinations, and then we can go on and talk a little bit later about the logistics of where you pick up and how many people you can take and all that sort of thing.
• 5:04
  Speaker 3: Sure.
• 5:05
  Speaker 3: So the most popular tour that we offer, and indeed the most popular day tour by far from London for all tour companies operating out of London, is Stonehenge and Bath in a day.
• 5:07
  Speaker 3: Now we do have two variations of this particular tour, but this is our most popular tour by far.
• 5:12
  Speaker 3: So we have a Stonehenge and Bath tour running certainly every single day for the peak season and most days even out of season two.
• 5:22
  Speaker 3: We have at least, in fact at least one tour.
• 5:26
  Speaker 3: Sometimes some days we have two separate tours visiting Stonehenge and Bath.
• 5:32
  Speaker 3: So we've got two iterations of this tour.
• 5:34
  Speaker 3: One is the tour that we are best known for and I think the tour that probably got us noticed all those years ago and really helped grow our business and put us on the map, and that is Stonehenge Bath and a Secret Place.
• 5:50
  Speaker 3: The other tour that we offer is Stonehenge Bath added on to a Cotswolds village, and in this case this Cotswolds village is the exquisite village of Castle Coon, which many say is the most beautiful village in England, and I can't really argue with that.
• 6:09
  Speaker 3: It is.
• 6:10
  Speaker 3: For anyone who's been there they will know it's just beautiful, stunning, it is.
• 6:16
  Speaker 2: Spellbinding it is.
• 6:17
  Speaker 2: It's a beautiful, beautiful road.
• 6:19
  Speaker 3: So those are our two most popular tours.
• 6:21
  Speaker 3: The Seacrum Play Store is still our most popular tour, although we are seeing more and more demand for our Cotswolds Village tour.
• 6:27
  Speaker 3: I think the presence of the Cotswolds on people's Instagrams anyone interested in seeing England has boosted the Cotswolds' popularity enormously.
• 6:40
  Speaker 3: But the notion of the Secret Place I think some people are a little bit cynical, thinking well, that's a bit odd.
• 6:45
  Speaker 3: Of the secret place people.
• 6:45
  Speaker 3: I think some people are a little bit cynical, thinking that's a bit odd, a secret place.
• 6:47
  Speaker 3: So we're so blessed as many of your listeners will know, we're so blessed with some spectacular countryside in this country and there's spectacular countryside between Bath and London.
• 6:59
  Speaker 3: That particular tour starts off at Stonehenge.
• 7:02
  Speaker 3: It then heads over to Bath and then from Bath we head back to London.
• 7:06
  Speaker 3: Now Bath is in the west of England, london is in the east of England.
• 7:09
  Speaker 3: From Bath to London, if you were to drive direct it would take about two and a half hours along a very boring motorway.
• 7:16
  Speaker 3: But we choose, rather than taking that boring route back to London and heading straight back to London, to take some of the back roads which we are able to do because our vehicles are smaller they seat 16, so we can take some of the really narrow, very English back roads that the big buses cannot even dream of trying to fit down.
• 7:35
  Speaker 3: So we take some of these back roads and we see some of the countryside between Bath and London up close and the tour guide on the day will choose a particular place to stop at as that tour's secret place.
• 7:49
  Speaker 3: Now this has been fun for us and it's been fun for our guests as well.
• 7:53
  Speaker 3: We're very lucky.
• 7:54
  Speaker 3: We've got a number of really interesting places that we can choose to stop at on our journey back from Bath to London and it's up to the tour guide on the day as to where they would like to stop.
• 8:05
  Speaker 3: And they tend to ask their guests some leading questions and find out their interests and based on that or the weather or just something that's going on, they make a choice as to where to stop and it leaves a little bit of suspense and surprise to the end of the day, which is always kind of fun as a guide because it kind of adds a bit to our performance as a guide and leaves a bit of suspense and curiosity for our guests and particularly when we have families on board, the kids particularly get engaged with this concept of, you know, having a secret on the tour.
• 8:42
  Speaker 3: The the parents are going to roll their eyes up, but invariably when we visit our secret places, our guests absolutely love them.
• 8:50
  Speaker 3: So the feedback is fantastic and certainly are thousands of online reviews about that tour.
• 8:57
  Speaker 2: Absolutely Well, I love the idea.
• 8:59
  Speaker 2: I just love the idea that you include that.
• 9:01
  Speaker 2: I mean, it's just fun, isn't it?
• 9:03
  Speaker 2: It's fun and, like you say, there's so many different secret places that you can choose from when you're driving back from back to London, so why not include one?
• 9:13
  Speaker 2: And I like the fact that it's not the same secret place on each tour as well, that there's a variation as well, depending, as you say, on the interest of the guests and the weather and the day, and so that's a lot of fun.
• 9:23
  Speaker 2: So, even if somebody's been on a tour and wants to spill the beans, they're not necessarily going to spill the correct beans of which secret place, because it could have been one of many.
• 9:33
  Speaker 3: It does happen, to our surprise and delight.
• 9:36
  Speaker 3: We actually have quite a few repeat guests or repeat customers who came on a tour with us 6, seven, eight, nine, ten years ago, who come back again.
• 9:47
  Speaker 3: Maybe they bring different family members or maybe they just want to remember it.
• 9:51
  Speaker 3: And we always check on our customer database as to whether anyone's been on a tour with us before.
• 9:57
  Speaker 3: And if they have, then we'll let the tour guide know.
• 10:00
  Speaker 3: Tour guide know and, um, if they can, a tour guide will uh subtly uh grill the, the past guests who have joined their tour to find out where they went and make sure that they don't go to the same place.
• 10:15
  Speaker 3: They're somewhere different.
• 10:16
  Speaker 3: Um, so again, that adds to the uh, to the jeopardy of uh of the tour that's fantastic, and I'm just going ask how long does that tour take?
• 10:26
  Speaker 2: I guess that's a full day out.
• 10:27
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's absolutely a full day out.
• 10:30
  Speaker 3: I mean Bath, as I said, is in the west of England, London's in the east of England, so the distances that we cover on that tour are pretty big.
• 10:38
  Speaker 3: I mean it's 240 miles, which is close to 400 kilometers.
• 10:42
  Speaker 3: The tour starts the first pickups at 8.45.
• 10:46
  Speaker 3: We don't get back to London until about 8.15, 8.30, depending on traffic.
• 10:50
  Speaker 3: So, yeah, it is absolutely a full day out, but there's so much to see, there's so much to talk about.
• 10:55
  Speaker 3: But at the same time we are acutely aware that many of our guests are perhaps a little bit jet lagged, perhaps a little bit jaded from sightseeing like crazy.
• 11:05
  Speaker 3: So we make sure that they have some rest time on the tour.
• 11:10
  Speaker 3: When we're travelling from A to B, Our vehicles are very comfortable and there's plenty of time for people to close their eyes, to save up their energy for when they get off at wherever the next stop is.
• 11:23
  Speaker 2: Okay, that sounds perfect.
• 11:24
  Speaker 2: So the Stonehenge tour is obviously top of the tree.
• 11:27
  Speaker 2: What else?
• 11:28
  Speaker 2: What other tours do you offer, Chris?
• 11:30
  Speaker 3: So the two other regular tour routes that we run are one is to the Cotswolds, Oxford and Stratford-upon-Avon, so that's a day tour, visiting those three locations in one day.
• 11:40
  Speaker 3: And the other tour that we offer is our Kent tour, which goes down to the most southeasterly county of England, Kent, known as the Garden of England, Absolutely beautiful county.
• 11:51
  Speaker 3: That tour visits Canterbury, which is the home of Christianity in Britain, so very, very important site of pilgrimage and home to the absolutely spectacular Canterbury Cathedral.
• 12:06
  Speaker 3: We also visit Dover, and in Dover we go and visit the White Cliffs of Dover and also Dover Castle.
• 12:13
  Speaker 3: So the White Cliffs I'm sure your listeners will have heard of the White Cliffs of Dover, very iconic English landmark that's provided safety and security when they saw it to so many returning soldiers returning on ships from France or airmen in the Air Force and a huge, beautiful white chalk cliffs.
• 12:37
  Speaker 3: I mean really spectacular stuff.
• 12:40
  Speaker 3: And Dover Castle, which is one of England's greatest castles.
• 12:44
  Speaker 3: It has a history stretching back 3,000 years.
• 12:47
  Speaker 3: There's Celtic Iron Age history there, Roman history, medieval history, World War I, World War II history.
• 12:56
  Speaker 3: We also head out into the countryside in Kent as well and go and have a look at a couple of villages, one village in particular, which is Chilham, which is a little sort of hidden village that not so many people seem to know about, but it's absolutely beautiful, probably Kent's most beautiful village.
• 13:11
  Speaker 3: So yeah, so that's a full day around Kent.
• 13:16
  Speaker 2: Okay, and the Cotswold one as well.
• 13:17
  Speaker 2: When you go to Stratford you go to Oxford and then I'm guessing you visit some of the Cotswolds villages as well on that day trip.
• 13:25
  Speaker 3: Yeah, we do.
• 13:25
  Speaker 3: Yeah, so that tour.
• 13:27
  Speaker 3: Obviously it starts in London.
• 13:29
  Speaker 3: Like all of our tours, our first stop is Stratford-upon-Avon, which is, of course, shakespeare's birthplace and a beautiful town in itself.
• 13:36
  Speaker 3: I mean, we tend to find that we might have a couple of big Shakespeare fans on this tour, but maybe most of our guests aren't particularly big Shakespeare fans.
• 13:44
  Speaker 3: But something that no one can deny is that Shakespeare is a huge, huge figure in literary history and whether you're from England, whether you're from Australia, whether you're from Peru, you know who Shakespeare is, and even if you don't like him and lots of people don't like him- just seeing.
• 14:04
  Speaker 3: I think that's all my problems with you and Shakespeare at school, chris, yes, yes, for those of us for whom Shakespeare was forced down our throats, yes, he's not necessarily the most popular person in the world, but just to see where he was born, to see the church where he is buried, it's so iconic.
• 14:19
  Speaker 3: And you know, even if you've never heard of Shakespeare, Stratford-upon-Avon is a really beautiful, very classic English town and a lovely place to explore, with a beautiful village that goes right through the middle of it.
• 14:30
  Speaker 3: Pretty beautiful river, sorry, River Avon.
• 14:33
  Speaker 3: So from Stratford we then head down to the Cotswolds, which I've obviously already talked about, so I'm sure your listeners will be familiar, beautiful countryside.
• 14:43
  Speaker 3: We make two stops in the Cotswolds.
• 14:45
  Speaker 3: One is in the town of Stow-on-a-Walt and we make a stop in the marketplace there for people to go grab a snack, do a little bit of shopping, get some photos, get themselves a cup of coffee, admire the architecture it's a very, very characterful town.
• 15:00
  Speaker 3: A cup of coffee, admire the architecture it's a very, very characterful town.
• 15:03
  Speaker 3: And then we head south and we wiggle our way through some very narrow little Cotswolds lanes, through some tiny little spectacular villages full of houses with astronomical price tags.
• 15:17
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I was going to say that, I was thinking that when you were saying it, I was like, yeah, past these beautiful, beautiful cottages that nobody can afford, yeah, yeah.
• 15:28
  Speaker 3: The Cotswolds is really a victim of its own success and anyone who has visited will know why.
• 15:35
  Speaker 3: Because it's just the most characterful area you can ever imagine.
• 15:40
  Speaker 3: Why?
• 15:42
  Speaker 3: Because it's just the most characterful area you can ever imagine.
• 15:43
  Speaker 3: And ultimately we head down to Bybrey, which is probably the most famous village in the Cotswolds, home of the Arlington Row beautiful row of houses dating back hundreds of years.
• 15:53
  Speaker 3: And, yeah, it's, it's, it's really typical of the Cotswolds library the architecture, the character, the serenity and again, it's a huge hit on social media library so my personal favourite Cotswolds village.
• 16:13
  Speaker 2: I absolutely love it, but I think it has been a victim of its own success at the moment.
• 16:17
  Speaker 2: Even in January, end of January, I drove through the library.
• 16:20
  Speaker 2: It was on on weekend.
• 16:21
  Speaker 2: I couldn't get parked.
• 16:23
  Speaker 2: I was like um.
• 16:25
  Speaker 2: So that's the advantage when you're with you guys, though, because you don't have to worry about parking well, uh, our guests don't.
• 16:32
  Speaker 3: We do, uh, but, but but we, we have a few tricks up our sleeve to get around potential issues caused by crowds in Bybrey not just Bybrey, but other locations.
• 16:49
  Speaker 3: Bear in mind, we do this day in, day out.
• 16:51
  Speaker 3: We've been doing this for years.
• 16:53
  Speaker 3: Way we picked up a few, uh few little trade secrets that we can use to just enhance people's experience and perhaps mask some of the crowds if some of the locations we're visiting are, uh are busy and also we use smaller vehicles.
• 17:10
  Speaker 3: So you know the tour companies operating on big coaches.
• 17:14
  Speaker 3: You know it's annoying for them.
• 17:17
  Speaker 3: You know some I have seen in the cost worlds these big coaches trapped because they can't get through, because people have parked at an angle where they're blocking the road and while we can get through in our smaller vehicles, these big coaches are trapped and it becomes some sort of, you know, wayne's world.
• 17:35
  Speaker 3: So Austin Powers-esque, you know comedy, benny Hill type kind of show where these coaches are trying to turn around and they can't fit, and are they going to knock down the dry stone wall, are they going to crash into the cottage?
• 17:48
  Speaker 3: And I mean, it's all a bit tragic really.
• 17:51
  Speaker 3: And I have to be honest, I do sort of chuckle under my breath sometimes when I'm driving past in a Mercedes Sprinter that is, you know, much narrower and can fit through these spaces.
• 18:05
  Speaker 2: And a lot more comfortable for a start-off than being in a big coupe.
• 18:09
  Speaker 2: So I mean, how many people do you fit in your little Mercedes-Benz minibuses?
• 18:16
  Speaker 3: So our vehicle seat is 16, so 1616.
• 18:21
  Speaker 3: In our case, because we only operate day tours, our vehicles are all specially designed just for us and we have specified them with removing the luggage space at the rear, therefore adding to the legroom.
• 18:36
  Speaker 3: Because we don't operate overnight tours, we don't need the luggage space, so we've got ourselves another one meter three foot or thereabouts of space which we've added incrementally to the legroom of the different seats.
• 18:50
  Speaker 3: So, yes, hopefully pretty comfortable for our guests and they're top of the range.
• 18:56
  Speaker 3: In fact, we're about to take delivery of the new one.
• 18:59
  Speaker 3: They come with rather astronomical price tags, but only the best for our customers.
• 19:06
  Speaker 2: I can imagine, and the thing is well, you're going to be spending quite a part of the day in it, so you want to be comfortable.
• 19:12
  Speaker 2: So it's good to know that, as you say, a 16-seater is really, really comfortable.
• 19:16
  Speaker 2: So you've got the room, you've got the legroom, and then is 16 the maximum that you take on a tour.
• 19:25
  Speaker 2: So obviously it's a small group.
• 19:26
  Speaker 2: So it doesn't matter if you're listening to this podcast and you're a solo traveler.
• 19:27
  Speaker 2: You're a couple, you're a family of four, you're a family of 10.
• 19:30
  Speaker 2: If Chris has got the spaces to book, you can book it.
• 19:33
  Speaker 2: It's not a problem.
• 19:34
  Speaker 2: It's not a private tour, so you can go along.
• 19:36
  Speaker 2: There'll be other people on the tour with you.
• 19:38
  Speaker 3: so, yeah, yeah, absolutely, um, 16 is the most we take.
• 19:43
  Speaker 3: But we have groups sort of with um containing like kind of mini groups as you described.
• 19:49
  Speaker 3: We have families, we have solo travelers um, we welcome everyone and we try and make everyone feel welcome as well.
• 19:56
  Speaker 3: Um, you know, if we can try and get the group gelled together and talking amongst each other if they want to, that's fantastic.
• 20:04
  Speaker 3: Certainly, solo travellers, we don't want anyone to feel left out.
• 20:07
  Speaker 3: So, you know, we try and focus our attention on them if we think that you know they might not know anyone and we should try and generate a nice atmosphere.
• 20:20
  Speaker 3: What we want to do with our tour groups is make them feel like almost like a group of friends out for a day out, because we're very relaxed as tour guides, we want to be welcoming and friendly to our guests and if we can generate an atmosphere where people are very comfortable amongst themselves, and that's fantastic.
• 20:42
  Speaker 3: I know we only have the group for a day, but it's quite a powerful shared experience.
• 20:47
  Speaker 3: You know, we're going to some really amazingly beautiful and iconic and historically significant locations and for most of our guests it's the first time they've ever visited these places and they're having a great time and they're sharing their great time with people that they've never met before, but perhaps people that they have a powerful shared experience with and people that they can get along really well with, and that's great.
• 21:12
  Speaker 3: And we've seen some great friendships spark up from our tours and we've had emails from past guests saying oh, I came on your tour five years ago and I met so-and-so and blah, blah, blah.
• 21:22
  Speaker 3: In fact, we even had, a few years ago, we had a couple who got engaged.
• 21:26
  Speaker 3: They'd met on the tour and they got engaged.
• 21:28
  Speaker 3: So it's weird.
• 21:31
  Speaker 3: You know, these are the kind of things that we never thought would happen 15 years ago when we set up.
• 21:35
  Speaker 3: But you know, there's that.
• 21:39
  Speaker 2: It's lovely.
• 21:44
  Speaker 2: It's really lovely that, though and I think it's important I think, um, you know being able to you're going out with a, with everybody to save for that day you've got the same mixing with the same people, you've got the same tour guide, so being able to get on with each other, it's just really helpful just to get to know each other as you're traveling together.
• 21:57
  Speaker 2: It's nice because it can be uncomfortable sometimes if I've been on tours before when nobody really gets introduced.
• 22:02
  Speaker 2: Actually, I did a tour last year when I was on my own it wasn't in the UK and nobody spoke to me, and I tried to keep talking to people and I was like I was kind of hoping the tour guide would do a bit more work to help me out, but it was really uncomfortable and I didn't enjoy it.
• 22:15
  Speaker 2: So it's good to know that you know your guys are looking out and you know looking out for everybody, especially the solo travelers who may be sitting there thinking I'd like to talk to some people on my day out when I'm going to Stonehenge or Bath.
• 22:27
  Speaker 2: So let's talk a little bit about the logistics then.
• 22:29
  Speaker 2: So you depart from London, so talk about whereabouts you depart from, where people have to go to meet for your tours.
• 22:36
  Speaker 3: Okay, so we've got two pickup points.
• 22:38
  Speaker 3: First pick-up point that we use for all of our tours is the London Eye, which is, as most of your listeners probably know, the enormous wheel ferris wheel, can we call it that in the heart of London am and we pick up from the closest point on the road to the London Eye.
• 22:54
  Speaker 3: It's less than one minute walk the corner of Chichely Street and Belvedere Road.
• 23:08
  Speaker 2: Yep, yep.
• 23:09
  Speaker 2: So all of our tours depart from there.
• 23:11
  Speaker 3: Then we have another pickup point where all of our tours, except for our Kent tour pick up from Our Kent tour, heads southeast and in the opposite direction to our other pick-up point, which is Victoria.
• 23:23
  Speaker 3: So our other tours, so our Stonehenge and Bath tours, our Oxford, stratford and the Cotswolds tour, also pick up from Victoria outside the Doubletree Hilton Hotel which is immediately opposite Victoria Station, and we pick up from there for those three tours, so our two iterations of Stonehenge Bar Tour and our Cotswolds, oxford and Stratford Tour.
• 23:44
  Speaker 3: We pick up from there at 9.10, 10 past 9am, immediately outside that hotel.
• 23:52
  Speaker 2: Okay, so that's perfect.
• 23:52
  Speaker 2: And what do people need to bring with them on it when they come with you guys to the day?
• 23:58
  Speaker 3: The camera, the phone to take pictures with their wallet, to buy ice cream and snacks and souvenirs.
• 24:05
  Speaker 3: Other than that, I mean, if it's raining which it does occasionally in this country, only occasionally then maybe something to shelter them from the rain, a raincoat or an umbrella, otherwise nothing.
• 24:19
  Speaker 3: Bring themselves and bring their eyes and ears and they're going to be treated we certainly hope and we will do our very best to ensure to an amazing day out where they get to see some incredible locations and these locations are enhanced by the experience that we can provide, aided by their tour guide.
• 24:40
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I was going to ask you about the tour guide.
• 24:41
  Speaker 2: So if I was going to go and I meet you guys at the London Eye, so what happens?
• 24:46
  Speaker 2: I turn up and I'm like, hi, it's Tracy, I've come to do your tour, I'm going to Stonehenge today.
• 24:51
  Speaker 2: Then what happens?
• 24:54
  Speaker 3: Yeah, so we don't need QR codes or you know complicated, you know proof of bookings.
• 25:01
  Speaker 3: We just turn up.
• 25:03
  Speaker 3: We've got a list of names.
• 25:04
  Speaker 3: Tick your name off the list, say hello, we'll introduce ourselves.
• 25:07
  Speaker 3: And um, you then hop aboard, take a seat, um, simple as that, that's it.
• 25:14
  Speaker 3: And then.
• 25:14
  Speaker 3: And then you know, once we've got everyone, we'll we'll get going and is that the driver?
• 25:19
  Speaker 2: that also the tour guide, or do you have a driver and a tour guide?
• 25:22
  Speaker 3: Yeah, so the driver is also the tour guide.
• 25:24
  Speaker 3: So the driver's got a microphone that's attached to the vehicle that they can talk into when they drive.
• 25:34
  Speaker 3: So they're guiding while driving, but they're also guiding when we get off the bus.
• 25:37
  Speaker 3: So this actually differentiates us from some of the other companies out there who operate small group tours.
• 25:45
  Speaker 3: So our guides will guide off the vehicle as well.
• 25:48
  Speaker 3: Lots of companies who still remain unnamed.
• 25:50
  Speaker 3: They, the guys, just guide when they're on the vehicle.
• 25:53
  Speaker 3: When they're off the vehicle, you're on your own, you are on your own, but I can't believe that this happens and that they do this.
• 26:00
  Speaker 3: Um, we make sure that when we're off the vehicle, you know, for example, when visiting Stonehenge, we'll make sure that we lead all of our guests up to Stonehenge and we try and enhance their experience and their knowledge.
• 26:11
  Speaker 3: Obviously, we are acutely aware that people want to explore places at their own pace and, you know, without the talk eye gravitating on them.
• 26:19
  Speaker 3: But so we balance out the amount of interaction that we have on and off the vehicle, but also, you know, when we're off the vehicle, in places like Bath on our Stonehenge Bath tours.
• 26:32
  Speaker 3: In Oxford on our Oxford's Travel and Cottage Balls tour.
• 26:35
  Speaker 3: In Canterbury on our Kent's Canterbury Dover tour.
• 26:38
  Speaker 3: We also offer walking tours for our guests, so if they want to join, then the tour guide will be leading a walking tour around these cities.
• 26:48
  Speaker 3: If they want to do their own thing, they can obviously do their own thing.
• 26:52
  Speaker 3: These walking tours are absolutely not compulsory, but if they'd like to join, they can turn up at the time and location given by the tour guide to join these walking tours.
• 27:03
  Speaker 2: Okay, that's perfect.
• 27:04
  Speaker 2: That sounds great.
• 27:05
  Speaker 2: I like the fact that's an option as well, so you get a choice with that.
• 27:07
  Speaker 2: If you want to go and explore a little bit on your own or if you want to spend the time with a tour guide, you can do it.
• 27:12
  Speaker 2: So that's really good.
• 27:12
  Speaker 2: So I know you mentioned before about obviously you have families that come on.
• 27:17
  Speaker 2: Is there from a specific age or do you cater from kind of very young?
• 27:22
  Speaker 3: So our minimum age, as per our terms and conditions, is three.
• 27:26
  Speaker 3: And we do have families who bring young children.
• 27:30
  Speaker 3: Not so many, most families who come with kids.
• 27:34
  Speaker 3: The kids are probably nine, ten and above.
• 27:38
  Speaker 3: There are long days, our tours, and you know, there's quite a lot of historical information.
• 27:45
  Speaker 3: I mean, there's a lot of fun stuff as well, you know, so we can cater for the audience and vary what we talk about.
• 27:51
  Speaker 3: I mean, there is so much to talk about.
• 27:53
  Speaker 3: I like to think that our guides could probably do our tours at walking speed and still have things to talk about, even though they're 240 miles long some of them and would probably take about three weeks to walk.
• 28:06
  Speaker 3: But we tend to say people inquire and they're saying we've got young kids, we'd like to come on the tour.
• 28:13
  Speaker 3: What do you think?
• 28:13
  Speaker 3: Well, as a parent myself, we tend to suggest that unless these children are very patient, very relaxed, very inquisitive and happy traveling for quite a long time during a day, then the tours probably aren't for them.
• 28:35
  Speaker 3: Certainly, my children probably would struggle on a 12-hour tour.
• 28:41
  Speaker 3: But we've had, I mean, I've met some amazing kids and parents who made me feel totally inadequate as a parent because their children who are, you know, 5, 6, 7, come on tours with us and behave impeccably and are asking the best questions of all of the customers on board and, you know, seem to absolutely love the experience.
• 29:05
  Speaker 3: So you know, it suits some, it doesn't suit others.
• 29:09
  Speaker 3: We respect that.
• 29:11
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I think that's good.
• 29:12
  Speaker 2: It's just thinking carefully whether if you've got young children, or whether it's actually going to suit them for the day or not, but you'll know your children, so that's a good one.
• 29:19
  Speaker 2: What about people with mobility issues?
• 29:28
  Speaker 3: Are you able to cater for those people?
• 29:29
  Speaker 3: Yes, so, yeah, to an extent.
• 29:30
  Speaker 3: Yes, um, I mean, we have plenty of people come on tours with mobility issues.
• 29:32
  Speaker 3: We, the only real thing that we can't cater for, is people who cannot climb more than three steps.
• 29:38
  Speaker 3: Our vehicles are not wheelchair accessible.
• 29:41
  Speaker 3: Wheelchair accessible vehicles of the size that we operate are just not available on the market.
• 29:48
  Speaker 3: However, if our guests have a foldable wheelchair, or they have a foldable walker, or I'm trying to think of other contraptions, we've taken a knee walker.
• 30:02
  Speaker 3: Uh, that's obviously fine, we can take them, no problem, we can fit them in the luggage compartments and as long as they, they can climb um, three steps, which is up.
• 30:13
  Speaker 3: That, that's the steps up onto the vehicle, although there is a handrail and of course, you know we will aid wherever we can.
• 30:18
  Speaker 3: So so, yes, so we can to an extent cater for those with mobility issues.
• 30:24
  Speaker 3: Absolutely, our Stonehenge Bath Tour.
• 30:27
  Speaker 3: There's not much walking involved.
• 30:30
  Speaker 3: There is a little bit of walking in Stonehenge.
• 30:32
  Speaker 3: That's unavoidable, although the Stonehenge ticket office do have wheelchairs that they will lend to people who need them, but in Bath we drop off right in the heart of Bath.
• 30:44
  Speaker 3: There's really very little walking that needs to be done.
• 30:48
  Speaker 3: So there's not much walking on that tour.
• 30:51
  Speaker 3: So that tour in particular suits those who struggle a bit with mobility.
• 30:56
  Speaker 3: Our other two tours are more restrictive for those who struggle with mobility because there is more unavoidable walking.
• 31:05
  Speaker 3: We just can't do anything about it because some of these historical locations, they were not built with vehicles in mind, so dropping off and picking up is difficult.
• 31:19
  Speaker 2: We have to walk a few minutes at least, obviously now we're going to talk about how you can book, because I know people are listening, you're listening right now I'm going.
• 31:27
  Speaker 2: Oh, I really want to go, uh, with english boss, I want to do one of these tours, sounds perfect.
• 31:33
  Speaker 2: So I'm kind of going to jump in, because chris has got website um, and I will share a link to his website in the show notes.
• 31:41
  Speaker 2: But Chris has very kindly given a discount to UK Travel Planet podcast listeners in our Facebook group.
• 31:51
  Speaker 2: That's right, chris.
• 31:52
  Speaker 2: That's right indeed.
• 31:54
  Speaker 2: Yeah, but to get that discount you need to go through the link in the show notes.
• 31:59
  Speaker 2: So I am going to put that in today's show notes, which will be at uktravelplanetcom forward slash episode 109.
• 32:06
  Speaker 2: And you also have to use the code UKTP5.
• 32:10
  Speaker 2: So if you go through the link and then put in UKTP5, you will get a 5% discount on any of the tours with English Bus, which is very kind of you, chris.
• 32:20
  Speaker 2: I really appreciate it and appreciate your support for UK Travel Planner and the community and all our listeners out there, because we know that you are extremely busy and an extremely popular day tour option from London and I know you get booked up, don't you?
• 32:34
  Speaker 2: You're pretty busy.
• 32:36
  Speaker 3: Yes, we are pretty busy, yeah, yeah, we are certainly fully booked almost every single day from April till mid-October, but I just wanted to say so.
• 32:47
  Speaker 3: We don't actually ever discount our tours.
• 32:49
  Speaker 3: So this is a very special offer and, yeah, only for the listeners of the UK Travel Planning Podcast.
• 32:58
  Speaker 3: Otherwise, there's no discount option at all for any guests.
• 33:02
  Speaker 2: No, that's it.
• 33:03
  Speaker 2: I was going to say it's very, very special for podcast listeners and members of the Facebook group, and if you pop onto the website, that's it.
• 33:09
  Speaker 2: There's no other discount.
• 33:10
  Speaker 2: Chris does not do it, the English boss does not do it, except for you guys.
• 33:14
  Speaker 2: So if you want to book with the English boss and why would you not?
• 33:17
  Speaker 2: That's what you need to go.
• 33:19
  Speaker 2: Go through the link and use that code and you'll get 5% off and you can go on all the tours.
• 33:26
  Speaker 3: I'm sure you have people who will book all of them.
• 33:27
  Speaker 3: Chris, we do.
• 33:27
  Speaker 3: We have people who they do one one year, they come back again the next year, they do a different one and they come back another year, but sometimes we have people who book all three.
• 33:39
  Speaker 3: I tend to recommend leaving a day or two between tours just to give a bit of variation.
• 33:43
  Speaker 3: But yeah, I mean, if you want to see as much of England as you can in a day, two days, three days, I mean, our tours are our itinerary and we try, and you know, make the days feel as relaxed as possible while packing as much in as we can, I think, given the most value you can for your guests as well.
• 34:12
  Speaker 2: I mean, it sounds like you know, if you're in London and you want to do a day trip and you want to see some of these places and we're often asked about Bath, we're asked about Stonehenge all the time we're asked about Dover Dover is incredibly popular with our American audience.
• 34:26
  Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely, this is the way to go.
• 34:29
  Speaker 2: If you want to do a small group option, the English bus is the way to go.
• 34:33
  Speaker 2: If you want to get picked up from London and taken to your destination and brought back to London and dropped back off, I guess you drop off at exactly the same locations that you pick up from Chris.
• 34:45
  Speaker 3: Yeah, we drop off back at the London Iron back in Victoria.
• 34:47
  Speaker 3: We will find out where people are staying, though, and if there's somewhere on routes that we can drop off or a little bit off routes that we can drop off to make people's journey a bit easier, then we will always try and do that.
• 34:58
  Speaker 2: But yeah, we go back to where we started for the drop-offs okay, perfect, well, thanks so much, chris, for coming on to the podcast this week.
• 35:06
  Speaker 2: It's been great chatting to you all about the english bus, the tours that you do and kind of meeting you face to face.
• 35:11
  Speaker 2: We've chatted a few times via email, so it's really good to see you and, and uh, welcoming you on to the podcast thank you very much for having me.
• 35:19
  Speaker 2: It's been it's been a lot of fun thank you for tuning in to this week's episode of the uk travel planning podcast.
• 35:26
  Speaker 2: As always, show notes can be found at uktravelplanningcom.
• 35:30
  Speaker 2: If you've enjoyed the show, why not leave us feedback via text or a review on your favorite podcast app?
• 35:36
  Speaker 2: We love to hear from you and you never know.
• 35:39
  Speaker 2: You may receive a shout out in a future episode, but, as always, that just leaves me to say until next week.
• 35:45
  Speaker 2: Happy uk travel planning.