ALAN AIM
Alan Aim, Director at Travel by Knight, talks to Dominic Ward about his entry into the industry with his unique converted Mercedes-Benz Sprinter sleeper
“Would you go to bed with me?” A question often met with a negative answer and, almost certainly, would be one of the last things you expect to see adorned on the side of a Mercedes-Benz Sprinter travelling across the UK.
However, for Alan Aim, Director at Travel by Knight, “Would you go to bed with me?” is more than just a question.
As the side of his converted Sprinter points out, Alan has developed the UK’s first sleeper mini coach.[wlm_nonmember][…]
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But, as he explained to me, his background hasn’t always been in the bus and coach industry.
Before buses
Alan told me that his father has a joinery business based in Orkney. He would have been the fifth generation of that company.
Alan then went to Edinburgh for university before returning to Orkney: “I went to university in Edinburgh and did business, then came back and worked for him for a bit. I had my first taste of bus life then. I bought an Iveco Daily minibus on a restricted license – that was from David Fishwicks. I ran that for about a year and a half, doing private hires in Orkney. It was mostly weekend work, and then through the summer when the cruise liners were in, picking up passengers and doing tours along the island before getting back on the cruise liner.
“After inheriting some money, I left Orkney and set up a retail franchise in Inverness. That was in 2010. Since that, I opened up a second store in Elgin in 2012, bought a store in Dundee in 2014, opened an Aberdeen store in 2014, and I got Cash Generator franchise of the year that year. Since that time, the business is going quite steady, so we’re just looking at different projects to do. I really want to get my teeth back into bussing.”
The conversion
In March 2017, Alan bought a secondhand tour band bus from a company in Liverpool. From there, he did a couple of jobs with it over the summer, including a trip to Germany and Glastonbury. But all that time – and since December 2016 – he was working with a conversion company in Swansea – Swansea Coachworks – to develop a sleeper bus, but on a mini coach. The vinyl work was undertaken by Signs Express Swansea.
“I just wanted to get rid of things on the sleeper buses that were more accustomed to the tour band industry,” said Alan. “So no kitchen area, no lounge area, no TVs, and just purely have it for sleeping berths to provide a service where we could get groups to travel between 250-500 miles overnight, combining their accommodation needs in one.
“It’s really now just taking this kind of new travel concept to the market, and seeing how we can take it from there.”
The inspiration for the conversion stems from Alan’s time at university, travelling between Orkney and Edinburgh: “Travelling from Orkney all the way down to Edinburgh was a day in itself. You could fly, but it’s actually cheaper to fly from Scotland to Amsterdam than it is to go from Edinburgh to Orkney, and I was always travelling on a student budget.
“The first bus was Edinburgh to Perth, the next bus Perth to Inverness, and the bus after was Inverness all the way to Scrabster. You’d start at 0900hrs and get there at 1900hrs, and then the ferry journey across.
“I’ve just seen somebody’s response on Facebook where they actually had a day travelling from the Borders to get all the way back, and all the kind of annoyances of delays and trains and buses, and then having to get hotel accommodation.
“So I suppose that’s where it’s really come from – those long journeys, having to waste your day to try and do it on the cheap, and try and get there – and sometimes with Orkney being quite a windy place, flying is not always the best option as well.”
When Alan originally went to Swansea, the design he went with was akin to sleeper buses used in Brazil, as well as countries in Asia such as Cambodia, Vietnam and India. “The difference between them and what we’ve got in the UK in terms of sleeper buses is that the sleeping berths are flat,” Alan commented. “They take up about 2.1m of space. Whereas with the Asian design – with the elevated headrest – the person behind’s feet comes into the space underneath your head. That means we could condense the sleeping berths down to about 1.6m, and therefore get more sleeping berths into a confined space, especially in a mini coach.
“In terms of the two buses that I own, the big double-decker that I have has 14 sleeping berths, and the mini coach that I have – which is about a third of the size – has 12 sleeping berths, so I can get just the same amount of people on it, but obviously you don’t have the luxuries of a TV, lounge, or kitchen area.
“The idea is that people sleep on the coach – pick them up late at night, drive them overnight, and deliver them first thing in the morning. So their waking hours on the bus are very limited.”
Travel by Knight runs on a restricted operator’s licence, meaning Alan can have no more than two vehicles with no more than 16 passenger seats each. Alan added: “The idea was to try and get us launched, try and get a bit of seedling interest there, and I’m now in the process of trying to get my stores sold so that I can raise about £1m of capital, which we can then look to further invest, and get bigger coaches developed with these sleeper-type vehicles.”
Young Bus Managers Network
I came across Alan at the Young Bus Managers Network (YBMN) event in Oxford (see CBW1315), where co-patron of YBMN, Roger French, invited Alan to give an impromptu speech about his vehicle. What I found particularly amusing was Alan’s post on his Facebook page: “Room full of Bus managers from Stagecoach, First, Arriva, Go-Ahead, etc, but I’m the only one who actually turned up with a bus!! [sic]”
I asked Alan what his thoughts were on the event, and he said he thought the speakers had some great stories, mentioning Kevin O’Connor from Arriva and Martijn Gilbert from Reading Buses in particular.
The event proved worthwhile for Alan as, whilst the vehicle parked outside had plenty of interest from the delegates, he also found inspiration from one of them: “I found actually inspiration from a guy – unfortunately I forget his name – but he started with I think two minibuses, and he’s now got 38 services.
“His advice to me – and I thought it was brilliant – was he slowly but surely nibbled at the unpopular routes in his area, so the bigger companies weren’t paying attention to him, and he eventually took enough of the market off them. But their overheads were then too expensive, so eventually he drove them out of town, and he compared that to a lion that has a chunk of meat. He said ‘well if you nibble at the scraps around him, the lion’s not going to attack you – he’s not going to give up his big meat to attack you for stealing the little bits of scraps, and eventually you gnaw it down until what he’s got left is less than all the scraps of meat that you’ve got.’
Ambitions
If you listened to Alan talk about his ambitions, you too would be in awe. “The overall ambition is – and I jokingly say this but I kind of mean it in truth – but I would love one day to have a network of sleeper buses that would connect Glasgow all the way to Beijing,” Alan said. “I think the concept of getting on a vehicle at night, travelling 500 miles, waking up in a new destination after you’ve been rested, then you have a whole day in that new destination to either do work, or sightsee, or visit family, or leisure, and then the next night, jumping on the next vehicle and going another 500 miles, and doing that all the way from Europe to Asia I think is very much achievable.”
For now though, Alan’s ambitions focus on a scheduled passenger service: “My ambition now, having got the concept on the one mini coach is to see if we can do it on an even bigger vehicle, and get a scheduled public transport route put together. I know that it didn’t work with Stagecoach, with the megabusGold service from Scotland to London. I say that didn’t work, but from the discussions I’ve had with other people in the industry, it wasn’t that it wasn’t profitable. I believe it could work, and obviously with the design of the berths I think you could get more people per coach, so there could be extra revenue generated per vehicle in doing it that way.”
Alan’s ambition to connect Glasgow with Beijing – some 5,000 miles away – might seem eccentric, but it’s an eccentricity that is reflected even in the company’s logo.
Said Alan: “The logo of the company is based on a character called Don Quixote from the play Man of La Mancha. He was a bit of an eccentric knight, and one of the lines that I really liked was that he said ‘insanity was to see the world as it is and not as it should be.’ So we’re doing a chivalrous thing by giving passengers back time in their day, rather than doing a long distance journey and having to spend hours on either a bus or a train.
‘I think that my underlying thinking with the design of the logo is “save your day, Travel by Knight.’”[/wlm_ismember]
