NEW BUS LINE * USA - City-to-city luxury buses cropping up in Florida
Intercity bus service as the fastest growing mode transportation for the third consecutive year
(Photos by JAY CONNER/STAFFA - RedCoach bus pulls out of the staging area at Tampa International Airport headed for Orlando)
Tampa,FL,USA -The Tampa Tribune, by TED JACKOVICS -February 13, 2011: -- Luis Mercado was on his way from Tampa International Airport to Miami International Airport last week. Instead of heading to an American or Continental Airlines flight, he rode an elevator downstairs to board a RedCoach luxury bus... The half-million dollar coach is equipped with 27 individual leather seats in a bus designed to accommodate twice as many seats, a spacious arrangement with WiFi connections, LCD movie screens and a GPS tracking system... The amenities primarily target business travelers on intrastate trips to compete with air service bedeviled by baggage fees, security line waits and crowded airliners... The lifeguard from Puerto Rico got luxury on a level he could not have envisioned when he booked his $50 ticket, saving anywhere from $40 to more than a couple hundred dollars on a flight...
(A passenger sits in the luxury RedCoach bus before it pulls out of the staging area at Tampa International Airport headed for Orlando)
He was the only passenger on the 8 a.m. Tampa-Orlando leg of his trip... But if national ridership trends on buses, airlines and trains and the history of RedCoach's Argentine-based ownership is any indication, the new bus service is poised for growth... The so-called "curbside operators," which eschew traditional bus stations and offer WiFi and other amenities, have sprung up in recent years to serve metro areas such as New York, Washington, D.C., and Chicago... Operators such as Megabus and Boltbus are expanding their routes to smaller cities such as Hartford, Conn., and Raleigh N.C., the study by DePaul's Chaddick Institute for Metropolitan Development reported... RedCoach appears to be the only similar operation in Florida, where it began Miami-to-Orlando operations in April... It has since expanded to Atlanta, Tifton, Ga., Jacksonville, Fort Pierce, West Palm Beach, Daytona Beach, Gainesville, Tallahassee, a Disney station in Lake Buena Vista and Tampa... RedCoach originally had business travelers in mind, so Tallahassee with its government workers was a natural destination, Shaw said. Then the University of Florida in Gainesville asked RedCoach to serve its campus. These days, the college student market is growing both in Gainesville and Tallahassee, with students finding Internet connections a convenient way to spend time on the road between home and college, Shaw said... RedCoach is a U.S division of Grupo Plaza, one of South America's largest transportation operations... The privately-owned family business operates 1,700 buses that serve 180 million passengers annually... The descendants of Grupo Plaza founder Nicola Cirigliano, a peasant from Italy who migrated to Argentina after World War II and started a bus business, decided to launch the luxury bus concept in Florida after first-hand experience flying into the state's airports. They believed an alternative to short-hop flights would be profitable...Labels: new bus routes, service quality
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