Who Where Why – 25 Years Of Cool Bus

In my late teens I was a big fan of nineties alternative band, Jesus Jones. Their unique sound blended rock guitars, synths, samples and front man, Mike Edwards’ husky vocals. I still have the original vinyl pressings of their first two albums on a shelf in the Cool Bus ‘Boffice’. 1989’s ‘Liquidiser’ was a low key success which included the excellent single, ‘Info Freako’, but it was the follow up, ‘Doubt’, which really put them on the map. Singles such as ‘Real, Real, Real’, ‘International Bright Young Thing’ and ‘Who Where Why’ brought worldwide success including a sell out US tour and landing them Best New Artist at the MTV awards.

In my forties I was a big fan of the TV gameshow, Pointless. The one hour time difference in France meant the show aired just after 6pm which happened to coincide with my dinner hour and  it became a daily ritual. The presenter, Alexander Armstrong, carefully walks the line between being incredibly posh but also, self effacing and intensely likeable.

Contestants must answer various questions that have been put to a panel of one hundred members of the public. The aim is to provide answers that are correct but were given by the fewest of the one hundred, the ultimate goal being a pointless answer, one that no one else came up with. The competing pairs are whittled down to reach a final where they are asked to choose from four categories. They are then given sixty seconds to come up with three answers, one of which must be pointless in order to win the jackpot.

In one episode the finalists chose the category ‘Who Where Why’. Their task was to come up with UK top ten singles that included either the word Who or Where or Why. Those words triggered a memory stored back in the nineties. “Jesus Jones, Who Where Why” I shouted at the telly and then again with more urgency at my nonchalant wife. Imagine my intense satisfaction when Xander worked his way through the contestants substandard responses before asking Richard Osman for the pointless answers. In a TV first, Who, Where, Why was not only a pointless answer but it could have won in all three subcategories. Has such a feat ever been achieved by a TV viewer before. I very much doubt it and I have been basking in the glory ever since.

Frustratingly, with regard to Cool Bus, it actually makes more sense to deal with these three basic questions in a different order. Where, Why, Who is more chronologically pleasing but I didn’t want to let that get in the way of wasting the first four paragraphs on a ‘Pointless’ brag.

The ‘Where’, in case you were un-a-where, is Bourg St. Maurice. The reason for this may seem obvious at first glance. We are, after all, situated in a major transport hub for some of the biggest ski resorts in the world. 

Les Arcs, linked by cable car with La Plagne, is right on our doorstep, just ten minutes away on the funicular railway. Tignes and Val d’Isere are forty minutes up the valley road. La Rosiere, linked with La Thuile in Italy is thirty minutes drive and even accessible using the Ecudets chairlift just outside Bourg. In the opposite direction, the behemoth that is the Trois Vallees is thirty to ninety minutes away, depending which of its many resort towns you are headed for (Courchevel, Meribel, Les Menuires and Val Thorens to name but a few of those). Add in the smaller resorts of Ste. Foy and Valmorel and you have the highest concentration of lift accessed skiing available anywhere in the world. 

Clearly a great place to set up an airport transfer company but the truth is, I started visiting Bourg St. Maurice long before I had any aspirations towards working in the ski industry. 

During my first week at big school, aged 11, I signed up for the school canoe club. A quick decision that undoubtedly altered the trajectory of my life. Canoe slalom quickly became all consuming. We would train after school and be away at races all over the country every other weekend. A VHS cassette did the rounds in the club showing highlights from the recent World Championships in a place called Bourg St. Maurice. The river looked ferocious compared to anything we had in the UK, with huge boulders and frothing turquoise water. I recall an iconic photo from this competition that was on the wall at our school, featuring Richard Fox (multiple British and World Champion) launching off a drop on the Isere river with half of his kayak in mid-air and a banner in the background advertising something called Les Arcs.

A couple of years later I got the chance to kayak on the Isere myself. I was still only 14 years old and nothing in the UK prepared me for the sheer force of a steep alpine river in full flow. It wasn’t long before I capsized, failed to eskimo roll several times and took an uncomfortable swim in the icy river.

Three years later I was back. This time in the company of a couple of good friends, including Will Edwards who I’d just been to the Junior World Championships with. We were older and stronger and spent a week training twice a day on the Isere and evenings drinking cheap French bottled beer while setting the world to rights. 

Bourg Saint Maurice Summer 1992

This was when I really fell in love with Bourg. The place had such a friendly, laid back vibe. I was immediately sold on the fact that you could turn up, pitch a tent next to the river for a week for free and have a raging campfire every night without anyone batting an eyelid. This was my first trip with friends to Europe as a responsible ‘adult’. While others my age were sampling the delights of Magaluf and Benidorm, Bourg was definitely my cup of tea. 

The Brasserie de la Gare (no longer with us and opposite where the current Cafe de la Gare is situated) was the local canoeists hang out and had slalom photos and memorabilia on the walls. Tip-Top snowboard shop was already well established but in its original location on the high street. No trip to Bourg was complete without a visit to gawp at the shiny snowboards and pick up a new baseball cap or teeshirt.

By this point I had also been out on a school skiing trip to La Plagne and spent a couple of weeks camping with my parents in Annecy. Safe to say that I was very much enamoured with this corner of the French Alps. I returned to Bourg several more times over the next few years firstly with some mates from College and then again in 2001 in the first ever Cool Bus, prior to its first winter as a transfer vehicle. When the time came to make the move out to the Alps, Bourg was the obvious choice, but why airport transfers? And Why ‘Cool Bus’?

While studying for an HND in Sport Science at the centre of academic excellence that is Grimsby College of Technology and Arts, I had managed to convince my head of year that the College should provide me with funds to travel up to Scotland to train to be a snowboard instructor. The training and exams were much tougher than I expected but I got myself a pass and then naively thought I could simply head out to the Alps the following winter and get a job as a snowboard instructor. 

No chance. As is widely known these days, the French have ski and snowboard instructing pretty well sewn up and the possibility of getting a job with a British qualification back then was precisely zero. By that point I was already in the Alps though and since I had accommodation sorted in the shape of a short wheel base Ford Transit with a mattress and gas hob in the back, I decided to stay on as long as my money would allow. 

Meribel 1996

It certainly wouldn’t stretch to a lift pass so I became expert at timing snowboard outings to coincide with the lift operators lunch breaks. At this time there would only be one person loading people onto lifts and no one checking passes. I always made sure I gave the lifty a big smile and a ‘bonjour ‘ and over time, they saw me so often eventually they just assumed I was a seasonal worker. 

Part way through this winter, my friend Rich Davenport, flew out to join me for some snowboarding. He used a budget airline and flew into Grenoble airport. It was very apparent that the infrastructure did not exist to support this emerging market. Package holidays still dominated. I had heard stories of seasonaires making a few francs by collecting friends of friends from the airport. I collected Rich myself and I guess you might say that this was my first airport transfer. It was also one of the most awkward.

A few weeks previous, the accelerator cable had snapped on my van. In the spirit of MacGyver I had substituted it with a pair of shoelaces tied together. The glaring issue was that they stretched a good deal more than the original steel cable so simply attaching them to the pedal was never going to work. Instead I ran the laces up past the steering wheel and attached them to the sun visor. To accelerate, all I had to do was pull the cord in a rearwards direction. It worked but was not ideal for tackling roundabouts where steering, indicating and changing gear all required more hands than I had available.

As payment for this first transfer, Rich brought me out a new accelerator cable and we carried out the replacement in Grenoble airport car park.

Extreme frugality such as this along with a diet of stale bread and broken biscuits allowed me stay out in the Alps right through until the end of March, which was long enough for me to make some good friends, do plenty of snowboarding and get an insight into seasonal life in the Alps. Fortunately it was too short for scurvy to set it.

A few years later, and lacking any solid direction in life, my girlfriend and I set off for a year backpacking around the world. This was a reasonably well trodden path involving stops in USA, Canada, the Pacific, New Zealand, Australia and then South East Asia. Twelve months without work really gives you time and space to think. I knew I wanted to live in the French Alps. I had seen there was some scope for shuttling skiers from airports but what about the summer? Some of the excursions we went on while backpacking made me wonder if something along those lines might work in Europe. Plus there was mountain biking.

With such things in mind, on my return to the UK I set about tracking down a vehicle that would give me as many options as possible, airport shuttles, carrying bikes, lots of baggage space and even some beds. And this is what lead me to purchase a ten year old Mercedes 508 minibus. This ia a vehicle easily big enough for twenty passenger seats but I found one registered with just eight, meaning it was fine to be driven commercially on a normal licence.

Cool Bus Mark One

Why so big? Because it was used to ferry disabled children to and from school. It came with a taillift for wheelchairs which I immediately removed and sold. It also came with ‘School Bus’ logos on all four sides. When deciding what to call my fledgling transport company, my mate Daniel quickly pointed out the obvious. Just doctor all the logos to read Cool Bus. Genius.

So we know where and why but who exactly is behind Cool Bus

Well firstly, it was me, trundling out to the Alps in a completely impractical three and a half tonne minibus to seek my fortune. There was no long term plan beyond getting as much snowboarding done as possible and finding new and more interesting ways to deal with mechanical issues in the most uncomfortable conditions. 

Even back in that bygone era, the internet had established itself as an essential marketplace and the Cool Bus website version 1.0 was fully developed and featured words, colours and a logo. The booking process was very simple – email me your requirements, receive a response within a few days, send a cheque to my Mum in the UK, wait for her weekly bank visit, a few more days for the cheque to clear and then receive a typed confirmation. The whole process could be achieved within a fortnight but only with the assistance of Mrs Eileen Forbes, so she must be included here as a key member of the team from day one.

Definitely also important to mention some other allies who helped kick off that first foray into the transport business. Chris Cracknell at Chill Chalet, David Parr at Seasonaires.com, Dave Jones at Pleisure holidays and Steph Lightfoot at Planet Subzero. Without the confidence they showed by sending clients my way, I would surely not have broken even that first winter and the journey would have ended there. 

Special mention to John and Owain Basset, Dan Evans and Will Hughes from Dragon Lodge. My first ever transfer was for clients of theirs in winter 2002 and we recently took a booking for people travelling to the Lodge in 2027 so that’s a full 25 years of collaboration. The longest standing snowboard specific chalet company in the Alps and owners that have always been in it for the right reasons. I am very proud to call them friends.

The full Dragon Lodge Crew, myself and some other friends just after riding down a volcano in Japan 2018

This might just blow the mind of anyone under thirty but back in 2002 I didn’t have a laptop to manage Cool Bus. My main tools were a hand written diary and Nokia 3310, my first ever mobile phone, which bought when I arrived in France. For accessing emails I used the the internet terminal in Bar Du Mont Blanc, Vallandry. Tracker still runs the place to this day and is another lifelong friend. Appropriately, the Blanc will play host to our 25th birthday celebrations in January.

To the surprise of many, not least myself, that first season did go well (bar a few initial hitches which I shall get into another time) and I found myself returning to Carol’s hostel, another source of several lifelong friends, in December 2002 for season two. This time I had so much work that I enlisted the assistance of a neighbour, Gary, who had his own Renault Espace people carrier and helped with excess work I couldn’t manage.

With two successful seasons under my belt it felt right to take a bigger step so I put a deposit down on a flat in Bourg St. Maurice and shelled out the princely sum of £1600 to buy our second vehicle – a blue Ford Transit minibus. If you’ve ever tried to manoeuvre a rear wheel drive type two Transit on snow you’ll know this was another vehicle that wasn’t perfectly suited to the rigours of the Alps. At least it didn’t weigh three and half tonnes though so it instantly became the showpiece vehicle of the fleet. Being fifteen years old it also inevitably resulted in me spending more of my time lying underneath it with melting snow dripping down my sleeve.

As impressive as my driving skills where at this point, I was still unable to drive two vehicles at once and so in stepped our first ever employee, Rich Beard. Neither wealthy nor possessing any significant facial hair, Rich was nevertheless, a stand up guy that I met through mountain biking (more on that another time). He handled the demands of his newly appointed boss with typical laid-back composure. On more than one occasion I sneaked into his room at midnight, reset his alarm and left a note detailing a transfer I needed him to handle the following morning. I’m not sure this style of personnel management is considered acceptable in 2026.

Rich Beard and I in the Spot Bar (I’m the one with the beard) and both of us plus Tim Morris and others before riding John O’Groats to Lands End in 2013

The following winter, Rich was off doing other things so he passed the torch on to Tim Morris. Tim and I had mutual friends from the Shrewsbury mountain bike fraternity and got along famously. This method of driver recruitment became the blueprint for the next twenty years. If you came to work for us you most likely knew either me or someone else who had worked for us. 

In my opinion, this proved to be the making of Cool Bus and almost all the drivers who came through Cool Bus bootcamp went on to be close friends. We shared similar outlooks on life, including a love of winter sports (initially almost exclusively snowboarders). In those early days we not only worked together we also lived in the same flat and consequently rode, lived and partied together as well. Many met their life partners while working for us and are now settled down with families which brings me to another important member of the team, Della Forbes. 

In 2004, on an otherwise disastrous trip to the Athens Olympics (a story for another day) she agreed to my proposition to assume the title of Mrs Cool Bus. A year later we were wed and she moved to the French Alps and the upstairs bedroom of Cool Bus towers. Happy to say that she settled into the life of sharing a ninety square metre flat with seven snowboarders with consummate ease. 

Original Cool Bus Wedding Invitation Artwork by Clive Hughes

In addition to driving, Della also took over some of the office responsibilities and it’s fair to say this side of the business moved to a new level of professionalism. Emails were responded to in a timely fashion and the days of drivers having their alarms reset by me were over.

These were the halcyon days of Cool Bus with the work/life balance sitting right in the sweet spot. Some of the drivers that came through the Cool Bus ranks over that period earned legendary status. Wallace, Funsize, Dom, Emily, Baby Ben, Mitson, The Baron, Yo-yo, Jemma to name but a few, all of whom are lifelong friends that I still meet up with on a regular basis. We had some years with amazing snow and some which were terrible but the camaraderie throughout was next level.

Christmas Day dinner at Chill Chalet and an impromptu party at the Cool Bus House

This proved essential in 2007 when I found myself with some legal issues. My transport licence was revoked when the authorities discovered two minor offences on my criminal record. This is incompatible with managing a transport company and so I had to find a quick solution while tackling clearing these from my record. Naturally all this came to light at the start of the winter, with an already full diary of transfers lined up and a significant sum borrowed from the bank to finance four brand new VW Caravelles.

Big shout here to Adam and Liz from Europe Transfer, who stepped in to help by essentially hiring all of us and renting our vans so we could operate temporarily for one winter under their licence. If it wasn’t for their bravery to take on the unknown and our drivers loyalty to stand by us in difficult times, the game may well have been up. 

Della and I stuck it out in the upstairs bedroom at Cool Bus towers for a few years but eventually the time came for us to find a place of our own. The final straw came when I got in from a long drive and Della handed me a plate of food she had lovingly prepared. I sat down on the sofa amongst the other drivers, some of who had been off all day and had drunk one or two beers. Wii Sports was a regular evening pastime in the house and one driver took an extra hard swing at Wii bowling and span around so fast that he came to rest in my lap and on my dinner plate. It was at this point that I decided the time had come to change our living arrangements. 

We moved into a flat just a few doors down and this proved to be a timely departure as Della was now pregnant with Cool Bus Billy. Wallace took over managing drivers and Rich Dunning produced our first ever booking system, BABS. We already had a quote calculator on our website which I had concocted with some basic HTML maths, considered reasonably advanced at the time. BABS added to this, a system allowing us to manage a booking database alongside a calendar and provide confirmations to our clients using this data. This immediately minimised the risk of human error and our office efficiency stepped up another notch.

Business really was booming at this point and we were increasing our fleet at a rate of two vehicles every year. All were VW Caravelles bought from new. Around this time some friends from my canoeing days moved to town – Jayne and Tim Morrison. I’d known both since we were teenagers and they too had felt the draw to a town they visited for summer training camps in their youth. Pretty soon Tim was working for us as a driver and Jayne took on the admin which by now was very much a full time job.

Brand new vans in the showroom

This was a position she made her own and still holds to this day. It’s hard to overstate the impact her professionalism brought to Cool Bus. She is incredibly thorough, never makes mistakes and has taught me a lot. Suffice to say, after well over a decade working together, she has also become a dear friend.

With an ever growing fleet, the next piece of the puzzle to be tackled was parking. For many years the funicular car park in Bourg had been the Cool Bus yard but in 2012 the Mairie decided to install barriers and start charging. In fairness this was absolutely necessary as a good portion of the space had become long term parking for some. While looking around for possible options, the Pink House on the main road through Bourg came to my attention. This was a place I knew well as its current owner was the previously mentioned David Parr of seasonaires.com

The Pink House

While I wasn’t looking to buy a property, it did have space to park a dozen vans and seemed like a decent investment. In November 2012  we moved in and the Pink House assumed its position in Cool Bus history. 

We now had space to house at least a dozen drivers and a garage. As luck would have it, one of our drivers, Tim Roberts, was also a fully qualified and highly experienced mechanic. He swiftly took on the role of vehicle maintenance, and we set about stocking the garage with the necessary tools and equipment including those for tyre fitting.

It’s hard to quantify how much money this saved us over the next seven or eight years but it must be in the tens of thousands. The real benefit though was having a mechanic who was Cool Bus through and through and more than happy to do the necessary to get issues sorted and vans back on the road no matter what the hour. It was not unheard of for Tim to be fitting brakes at midnight on a Friday or replacing a fan belt between shifts on a Saturday. If I was to make a list of Cool Bus Hero’s from the last twenty five years, Tim’s name would definitely appear right at the top.

Andy Parrini’s handiwork

And naturally, we did have ‘Cool Bus Hero’ teeshirts. The man responsible for these and many other designs was another member of our team, Mr. Andrew Parrini. Andy did several stints as a driver for us but already had a decent sideline making tee’s for various alpine based businesses. Another dear friend that I catch up with at least once a year.

We were now approaching peak Cool Bus – twenty four vans on the road, two spares and forty drivers. We were clocking up around one million kilometres every year. We had Jayne holding things down in the office, assisted by Sara. Bry Watt had taken over managing drivers. We had an actual desk in Geneva airport manned by the human foghorn, Jemma Harrison and a next level booking platform in the shape of Brian Birtle’s Alpsystems. 

So many drivers in fact that it’s difficult to list them all but here’s a few from those days that are either still driving for us now or are at least good friends that we see on a regular basis: Allan, Gilbo, Wayne, Will, Amy, Colin B, Colin R, Lauren, James, Nige, Sheryl, Ivan, Ross, Jelle, Pony, Gaz, Todd, Ollie, Rod, Mitch, Steve, David’s Back and Billings, Thorpey, Indi, Michael, Jon, Scott, Thomas, Jonas, Edi, Gilda, John Batley from Batley, Vincent, Gary, Finchy, Emily H, Ade, Laurent, I could go on…

Driver Roster 2018

Fair to say that, although business was booming, at that size I lost some of the connection that existed with the team ten years previously. With forty drivers, the risk of issues such as illness and injury increases and the likelihood of vehicle problems, be that mechanical or body work related also jumps up significantly. 

Business was great though. Bry left to set up a sideline offering bike shuttles in the south and Robyn stepped in to take on driver management, a role he made his own with a multitude of accompanying spreadsheets. Sara became the face of Cool Bus in Geneva, I constructed a ‘disco van’ for events and we even had our own magazine. In 2016 we branched into electric vehicles and by 2019 we had three Tesla Model X’s alongside our regular fleet of vans. 

Tesla Model X

And then, COVID…

Definitely a turning point. Nearly two years of inactivity exacts a huge toll. Vans had to be sold to keep us afloat. Support that we offered to local clubs and events such as the Les Arcs Freeski Academy and the Winter Film Festival had to be pulled. Furlough helped us see out the work contracts of drivers in 2020 but we had no driving staff in 2021. 

Operations finally resumed in December 2022 but we were half the size we had been previously. I took advantage of an interest free COVID loan to push the electric side of our business further. We invested in some charging infrastructure at the Pink House and Mercedes EQV minibuses to replace a few of the diesels we had sold. 

Mercedes EQV

It was something of a reset and post-COVID Cool Bus is a very different beast. Smaller and leaner, with a solid core of drivers, most of which had now worked for us for at least five years. It wasn’t long before the entire team were trained in the dark arts of EV driving. Our diesel fleet shrank and the electric side expanded to the point that we have now clocked up well over a million and a half electric kilometres.

Our driving team this year includes Allan, Gilbo, Wayne, Thomas, Sheryl, Ivan, David, Della and myself plus Jayne keeping things on track in the office. A stellar line up which includes well over one hundred winter seasons of experience. The electric share of our kilometres this year will easily exceed two thirds as it did last year and in 2025.

Just one final key group to include in the ‘who’s who’ of Cool Bus – our customers. Right from day one our success as a business came largely through word of mouth. That first winter we had just a few dozen direct clients but they told their friends and the next year it was a hundred, the following year two hundred, and so on… There are some that have used us for most of these last twenty five years – The Chastney’s. Eveleigh’s, Cornell’s and Atkinson’s of this world, to name just a few. I’d like to take this chance to give you all a huge thank you. To be frank, without clients on board there really is no point in driving to Geneva and back 😉