The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
ANTHONY PEREGRINE INSIDE TRAVEL
Being a coach tour courier is more stressful than you would imagine – and never forget that this is a holiday, not a study tour
From the outside, the job of coach tour courier looks a doddle. This is because, compared with road mending or orthopaedic surgery, it is. The main requirement is that you know a bit, know when to say it and, crucially, know when to shut up, which is often. Otherwise you come on like a Ryanair steward flogging scratch cards. I say this with authority because, once annually, I stop being a reporter in order to organise a French tour for a family coach company of Ingleton, North Yorkshire.
It’s one of the highlights of any year. I’ve just returned from 2019’s trip, ushering 36 northerners around Champagne, the Ardennes and the battlefields of Verdun over six days. I think – hope – it went OK, though I doubt we’ll be repeating a visit to a meat-processing plant on future trips (flanked by hanging carcasses and raw meat on all sides, an elegant lady from Kendal said: “If it was a straight choice between working here and prostitution, I’d choose the second.”).
So, no more meat factories, then. Here are 10 other things I’ve worked out in a decade as a very occasional courier:
1. Food and drink: British coach visitors are exacting. If there’s coffee planned, you need to build in milk, and tea, options. If there’s “wine included” at a meal, ensure there’s red and white. If there’s bread, you need butter. The French don’t always get this.
2. Britons will, however, try anything. Oysters, for instance. Raw. A year or two back, and prior to a Brittany oyster outing, the entire coach had been extremely reticent. But, after a boat trip to the Morbihan Gulf oyster beds and the urging
of a hopelessly handsome oyster man, taboos tumbled. Shortly, we had a lagoon-side oyster party going on. “I hope they’re not really an aphrodisiac,” said one woman. “I’ve been watching my husband, and he’s had nine.”
3. Coach drivers: never doubt their road craft. They know every traffic light, mountain pass and coach park between Keighley and Kosovo and have reversed 50-seater coaches down streets you’d think too slim for a Hillman Imp. They truly don’t need your input.
4. Never, ever underestimate the travelling holidaymakers. Coach parties have their critics, but this indicates that the critics have never been on a coach holiday. If they had, they’d know that coach travellers are, in the overwhelming majority, well-qualified, cultivated, courteous, witty and bettertravelled than the average travel writer. Than this average travel writer, anyway.
5. In the circumstances, the lady who asked: “What’s the French for ‘Grand Marnier’?” was joking. Meanwhile, the fellow who – on a different company’s tour, to the Somme – was surprised to learn that the French had been involved in the Great War (“I thought it was just us against the Germans”) was, it transpired, a mechanic. He was embarrassed. “Absolutely no need,” I said. “When my car breaks down, knowing about the Schlieffen Plan is a fat lot of good.”
6. Don’t over-egg the publicity. If you bill something as fabulous, stupendous and unmissable, it turns out to be a meat-processing plant in the Ardennes and you’re left looking stupid.
7. You need, too, to get the balance of information correct. People want to know a lot, but not everyone wants to know everything. This is a holiday, not a study tour.
8. In the Dordogne, as elsewhere, markets beat philosophers. Sarlat has both. Interest in Sarlat’s vast Saturday morning market outstripped that in local 16th-century sage Étienne de la Boétie by a factor too huge to be calculated. There was also, incidentally, a lesson for a snail stallholder in Sarlat that day.
A huge majority of coach travellers are well-qualified, witty and courteous
“You want to taste, monsieur?” he asked a chap in our group. “No,” replied the chap. “I’m English. I eat nothing smaller than a chicken.”
9. Punctuality is in the blood of wartime and postwar generations. No need to worry about people getting to the right place at the right time.
10. One last consideration so outstandingly vital that it shouldn’t have a number, for it overlays everything: this is the need to ensure that, wherever you are and whatever you are doing, there are lavatories in the vicinity. They don’t have to be sophisticated – we’ve had some rustic ones – but they do need to exist. Otherwise, no one’s paying attention to anything.