Bath Bus Co marks 20 years

Bath Bus Company is celebrating 20 years of serving the Bath area. To mark the occasion, it has painted a bus in the company’s original livery of 1997, comprised of bright cream and red. It also carries a number of the brand names, which have applied over the past two decades. Formed by four former Badgerline directors, the concern is now owned by French transport giant RATP, which the operator claims drove a series of innovations that raised standards including: the first multi-lingual tours in Bath, first to use headphones so residents were not disturbed by commentaries; first low emission tour buses in the UK; first use in the West of England of a classic London Routemaster; first use outside London of a New Routemaster on Imber Service; first operator to run (and withdraw) articulated bendy bus services in Bath and the first to use the bio-methane ‘Poo Bus’. It was among the earliest user of low floor easy access buses, on the Combe Down and Fox Hill services.

Bath Bus Company now has additional operations in Cardiff and Windsor. In order to assist in tour bus operations elsewhere, several of the operation’s managers have visited locations around the world, including Australia, America, the Caribbean, China, Greece and South Africa. Some of the longest serving staff helped launched the anniversary bus with a birthday cake, from the company’s Burnett base.

MD and founding member, Martin Curtis, said, ‘Although we struggled in the early years to become established, by setting our standards higher than other bus companies, we now enjoy considerable success and other operators have had to keep up with us to survive. We could not have achieved so much without the support and dedication of our staff at every level including those responsible for driving, guiding and engineering.’

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