San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Sightseeing bus operator riding out the pandemic
Sightseeing bus operator David Strainge started his business nearly 10 years ago, but his connection to bus tours goes back more than two decades.
It started in his hometown of Oxford, England. During college summer breaks from 1997 to 1999, Strainge worked part time convincing tourists to take a sightseeing trip aboard one of the tour buses run by his cousin.
He found he had a talent for hawking tickets. “I was good at it and earned more money than anyone else,” he recalled.
Strainge, 42, also enjoyed chatting with tourists from all over the world and answering their questions about the best places to eat, drink and explore in the university town.
After graduating from the University of Exeter in 2001 with a degree in business and accounting, Strainge was offered a position as the tour company’s special projects manager.
Strainge’s cousin, Paul Tappin, had bought a competing tour bus company. Strainge played a key role in merging the two companies.
He worked for City Sightseeing Oxford until 2009, but yearned to start his own tour bus business. He would have stayed in England, but hop-on, hop-off bus tours already existed in every major city there.
He started looking for cities in the U.S. without hop-on, hop-off tours. He toured the U.S. in 2009, spending several days in 10 cities.
He settled on San Antonio,
and in December 2010 with $300,000 borrowed from his family, he started City Sightseeing San Antonio. The tour company is affiliated with City Sightseeing in Seville, Spain, which provides reservations and marketing services.
The number of customers increased each year on the one-hour narrated tour through downtown, the Pearl and Southtown — until COVID-19 shut down his business March 18. The tours resumed June 18, but the tourists had largely disappeared.
Strainge’s tour company is the only one in the U.S. affiliated with City Sightseeing that has resumed operations.
We talked with Strainge about
the founding of his company in San Antonio and its recent challenges. The following transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Q:
What cities in the U.S. did you consider for your bus tour company?
A: Atlanta, Tampa, Orlando, Austin, Houston, San Antonio, Flagstaff, Phoenix and Tucson were the cities I considered. Some of them were not big enough to sustain enough volume year-round. And some places I thought would be great at certain times of year or even certain days of the week but wouldn’t be 365 days. Tampa, for example — I thought this could be great Friday, Saturday,
Sunday each week. Orlando, I ruled that out almost as soon as I got there. I realized nobody flies in to Orlando to spend time in Orlando. They fly to Orlando to spend their time at the theme parks. I figured if this doubledecker thing is a good idea, Disney would have done this 20 years ago. I rejected Austin because it’s all about university and young people, and those groups don’t care about bus tours. And Houston, it’s just about big business, skyscrapers, energy and dollars. Corporate but not leisure visitors. I thought Atlanta had great potential because of the civil rights thing, because of the Civil War history. And, you know, it’s a big, impressive city, but I just
prefer San Antonio.
Q:
What was it about San Antonio?
A: It met my criteria. There was no other double-decker tour. Nobody had ever done hop-on, hop-off bus tours anywhere in Texas before we began. I like the fact that there was a year-round visitor profile. You’ve got Spring Break, the young people crowd in March and Easter time. In the winter, fall and the spring, retired or older people come to San Antonio from up north, wanting to get away from the snow. You have got local people throughout the summer, and you’ve got a steady stream of corporate. Not that that really helps us, but one or two businesspeople will take the tour. But it’s just a nice, consistent flow.
Q:
How did you develop the route of the tour and the narration?
A: I came to San Antonio for a second time in February 2010. I walked around the Alamo Plaza and nearby streets. If you’d have been a policeman trailing me that week, you’d have thought I was planning a serial killing or some nefarious activities. I hung around watching all the patterns of where everybody was walking, watching the patterns of where the public was spending time, watching the patterns of which shops they were going into. I rented a car and I plotted a potential route. I drove it, then I amended it and then I drove it again. And as I went, I was stopping at places that I thought would make potential good bus stops for a minute or two min
utes. I was doing everything you would do in a bus — I was checking the tree heights, the width of the streets because you can’t take the bus down every tiny side street. So then I settled on what I thought might be a potential route. And then I started making notes about what you talk about on this route, what is historically interesting, what is a funny story, what is a ghost story. And after a week, I had tons of material.
Q: How is the pandemic affecting business?
A: Our core market is middleaged and older people, and
clearly they’re more vulnerable during the pandemic. So they’re not traveling as much. And if you talk to the hoteliers around here, they’ll tell you five nights a week they’re very quiet and then they’re just busy on Friday and Saturday. That’s the market at the moment. So we are growing — we’re about 30 percent of normal, when we were at 10 percent of normal in July. But we’ve got a long way to go to get back to where we were.
Q:
What are you doing to survive during this period of reduced business?
A: One is controlling costs. We
have less than half the staff that we did before the pandemic. We’ve cut our advertising budget. We’ve cut our marketing budget. It’s gone, combined, from $400,000 to $150,000. We have reduced the number of tour information centers from three to two. We have amended the schedule, so we start now at 9 instead of 8:40. We’re running every 30 minutes instead of every 20 minutes. So that means three buses instead of four. Sometimes we run four, but mostly three buses each day. Saturday is the one busy day of the week. Business is back to 60 percent of normal on that day.
The other six days are a mixed bag, but Saturdays are busy. We are doing the sensible things. We’re being cautious. There’s not much we can do other than wait for things to gradually improve.
Q:
When do you see your business getting back to normal?
A: I think spring will be good, but it won’t be 100 percent. I’m expecting spring to be back to maybe 70 to 80 percent of normal revenue and then by the middle of the year, up to 100 percent of normal. Some people are going to be wary of travel and leaving their house for the rest of their life. But I hope that’s just 1 percent of people, not 20 percent of people. But I know nothing more than anybody else. A vaccine could only help — it can’t hurt.
Q:
How is your company doing financially?
A: We are not making a profit currently, but we were one of the companies, fortunately, that got some PPP (federal stimulus) loan money. We got $200,000, so that was a huge help. But it doesn’t last that long when you’re paying wages and you’re paying rent. But it certainly allowed us to keep far more employees than we otherwise would. During the lockdown, we went from 44 staff members to three. And now we’re back up to about 20. Without the money, we would not be up to 20.
Q:
Do you think another government stimulus would be helpful?
A: For our industry, it’s crucial. The tourism and hospitality industry in this country must have a second PPP because it’s the industry that’s been most crushed. Bars and restaurants and airlines and tours and hotels have been severely hurt. Nothing has been as badly affected as the tourism and hospitality industry.
Q:
What is your vision for the company going forward?
A: We want to add a brewery tour or a brewery and distillery tour at certain times of the week or in the evenings in San Antonio. I have been to Napa Valley and Sonoma and to Fredericksburg, where all these vineyards are popping up. I think the brewery tours are something that would appeal in San Antonio, to locals as much as tourists. If we get back to our normal revenue and customer levels by the middle of 2021, we could be doing that by the end of next year. There’s tons of potential in this city.