[Previous entry: "Leasing an "Entertainer" Coach for the Philadelphia Folk Festival"]

05/17/2006: "Leasing an "Entertainer" Coach, Part II - Getting Quotes"

It's more than three months before the Philadelphia Folk Festival and the event tickets and camping passes still aren't available to purchase online. One would assume that, if we are willing to pay the fees and meet the contractual requirements, our group should be able attend the weekend event in the style and luxury of an "Entertainer" or "Crew/Band" motor coach. First, it wasn't as easy as I thought it would be to find on the Internet some links to the companies that lease these types of motor coaches. By using a large number of "search word" combinations, I was finally able to find a half-dozen or so companies that might be able to accomodate our group's plans. Of course, we had to eliminate a few of the selections due to geographical constraints. It makes no sense to have to pay for cross-country or cross-region pre and post event positioning logistics, and the potential for stretching a four or five day leasing window to potentially a week or more. Unfortunately, we did not consider that the leasing companies for these types of motor coaches, for the most part, aren't really in the business of leasing to private groups for a "luxury" one-time event.

Certainly, from the leasing company's point of view, there is a bit of the prestige factor involved. These types of motor coach conversions are an expensive proposition and it does make sense to try to squeeze as much promotional value (i.e. top name Stars and Entertainers as endorsements), as well as, per day leasing dollars, and preserve these resources for the longest lease period potential customers. Our research indicates there may be as few as 400 of this style of motor coach conversion and, at best, maybe 1000 for lease in the entire USA.

Another factor of our "luxury" event plan is the 'camping' environment of the Philadelphia Folk Festival. We felt that before we even started to obtain quotes for this leasing endeavor, it would be somewhat problematic to convince the chosen custom motor coach leasing companies to consider parking their resources for the weekend in a very crowded, heavy vehicle RV/Camper, and 'unimproved/no-services' campground that is essentially a farmer's field. We are well-aware that a heavy rainstorm at the time, or just before, departure back to the motor coach depot could spell disaster. Nonetheless, we decided to attempt our "luxury" event plan.

So far, we have made a 'request for quotation' to three custom motor coach leasing companies. First, we decided to try Concert Coach primarily because they list their locations as Philadelphia and Baltimore and one would think they would be ideally positioned geographically for our "luxury" event. Second, we submitted a quote request to The Bus Bank, apparently a leasing consolidator that advertizes service nation-wide. Our third choice for quotation was USA Bus Charter, another leasing consolidator that indicates nation-wide leasing.

It has been almost a week since we e-mailed, faxed, and/or telephoned our requests for quotation. The results so far are disappointing. Nothing from Concert Coach, a polite 'we can't help' email from The Bus Bank, and an actual phone call back from USA Bus Charter. However, the USA Bus Charter representative indicated our lease request would probably be at the upper end of the daily lease rate (i.e. approx. $3000/Day) and that the companies for which they lease consolidate would likely be holding out for a lease request for a longer term than our request during August, which is in peak season. We did indicate that the daily rate was not out of the question, but right about our limit. We said go ahead and see if we could secure an actual quotation, but alas, that has not happened yet. Next installment soon.....