Buses stay on the road

CEDAR RAPIDS - 'Every day's an adventure,” Doug Decker said of business at Cedar Valley World Travel, which he co-owns with wife Angela Decker.

The Cedar Rapids-based motor coach charter and tour company has been running since January 2007 when it spun off from Tri State Travel, Angela's family's longtime business.

Cedar Valley World Travel provides charter transportation services locally or to destinations throughout the continental United States and Canada. The company's fleet of vehicles ranges from five-passenger Sports Utility Vehicles to a 14-passenger van to 54- and 56-passenger deluxe motor coaches.

'That's one thing we offer that our competitors don't - multi-size vehicles to accommodate different size groups,” Doug Decker said.

They use their fleet to try to attract a range of clients with different transportation needs, from church and school groups going on multiday, cross-country trips to corporate clients and athletic teams seeking local airport transfers.

While roughly 60 to 70 percent of its revenue comes from motor coach charters, Cedar Valley World Travel also sells individual and group tour packages, including both planned trips for the public and organized tours for private groups and organizations.

'The majority of what we do is home-in-a-day,” Angela Decker said.

Destinations may include shopping trips to Chicago or the Mall of America, baseball games at nearby major league stadiums or tourist attractions such as Galena or the Pella Tulip Festival.

'We're always keeping an eye out for special events coming up that are appealing to our demographic,” she said, noting that the demographic skews older. 'The majority of our travelers, but not all, are retired people with time to travel.”

Roots in the business

Steve Tjossen said Decorah-based Hawkeye Stages also attracts primarily an older clientele for its motor coach tours.

'We see probably mostly retired people between 60 and 75 years of age,” he said.

Hawkeye Stages was founded in 1954 by Tjossen's grandfather, father and uncle and has been owned by Tjossen and wife, Kari, for the past decade. As with Cedar Valley World Travel, Hawkeye Stages offers both motor coach charters and organized tours.

'Our roots are in the charter bus business, but we're becoming more of a tour business, with about 60 percent of our revenue now coming from tours,” Tjossen said. 'It's changed over the last 10 years, especially, and I anticipate the tour business will continue to grow.”

Hawkeye Stages has two subsidiaries that arrange organized tours. Northland Travel, a travel agency, provides retail tours for individuals and groups to domestic and international destinations. Legacy Tour and Travel handles customized motor coach trips for school groups, bank clubs and other private organizations.

Hawkeye Stages's fleet of 24 motor coaches - most of which are standard 55-passenger coaches with an average age of around six years - generally serves as the transportation for overland tours.

On the retail side, Tjossen said that although the company offers some international and domestic air travel packages, the bulk of the business involves overland tours to locations within the United States.

Popular destinations include New York City, Washington, D.C., and Mackinac Island, Mich.

'The tours are tending to be a little shorter than they used to be,” Tjossen noted. 'It's getting tougher to sell three- and four-week tours like we used to.”

While trips may be getting shorter in length, travelers are finding more variety in the offerings. Tjossen said the company is making an effort to appeal to a more active traveler by adding activities such as hiking or walking tours to the itineraries of some packages.

'It can be a little more effective to tour places like New York City on foot than from inside a motor coach,” he said.

The company rates its tours on an 'activity level pace scale” of one to five, with one requiring minimal physical activity and five involving frequent vigorous activity, so travelers can determine which package best suits their capabilities.

One itinerary that is gaining in popularity in the motor coach travel industry is a 'mystery trip,” in which passengers board a motor coach for an unknown destination, leaving their fate in the hands of the trip's organizer.

'Would you do it?” asked Doug Decker, noting Cedar Valley World Travel has organized a number of mystery trips for clients in recent years. 'Once we have the itinerary, we have to treat it as top secret information.”

Hawkeye Stages, through its Northland Travel subsidiary, has added its own mystery trip to its retail offerings, with a three-day, two-night mystery trip tour package in March.

For people who prefer to find their entertainment at the craps or black jack tables, Kings and Queens Coaches offers twice-daily trips between Cedar Rapids and Meskwaki and trips to Riverside Casino three times a week.

Kings and Queens Office Manager Hope Mocon said these trips - subsidized by the casinos at little or no cost to passengers - are particularly popular with seniors.

But not all motor coach passengers are older travelers.

Tjossen said a sizable piece of his company's tour business is its Washington, D.C., educational tour program for students, in which around 30 schools have participated. The company employs current or retired teachers as tour guides for the weeklong trip.

'It's quite a program,” Tjossen said. 'We use the travel time to prepare the students for what they will be seeing. We don't just take them from point A to point B. We use the time to teach.”