It’s all change here at Kura! We’d like to take this opportunity to fill you in on what we’ve been up to and that means for you, especially during a time when the coach and minibus industry is suffering harder than most due to the pandemic.

In Q4 2020 under the leadership of our new CEO, Godfrey Ryan, we took the decision to distance ourselves from the Leisure travel market and focus on creating new opportunities in Education and Corporate transport, retiring our CoachHire.com brand in December 2020. The shift signals our switch to becoming a technology provider to complement the existing services provided by the UK Coach & Minibus industry. You can find out a bit more about these changes and Godfrey in a recent interview with Coach and Bus Week here.

We’ve also been campaigning hard to find a solution to the upcoming end to the PSVAR exemption for Home to School transport. Chris Coles, our Operations Director, is currently leading a group of over 100 schools, coach Operators, parents and consultants engaging with DfT to obtain either a further exemption period or a permanent solution that meets the needs of all stakeholders.

Tom Sharp is now our Head of Operator Engagement. He is driving to implement new ways of working alongside our partners and is available to discuss any issues or questions you should have in the coming weeks and months.

We are demonstrating our commitment to Operator partnership through the following steps:

  • A true partnership: We have negotiated with our partner schools to ensure that payments were not cut-off entirely for our contracted partner Operators when the third Lockdown was announced and we are working hard in all areas to ensure we can guarantee prompt payment and reliable income for Operators throughout the year
  • How we sell: Our new focus is selling the value of our technology to complement existing services, which can work with any Operator in any school and also from 2021, in businesses. We are not selling ourselves purely based on savings from routes.
  • Improved communication: We have a dedicated Head of Operator Engagement (Tom Sharp) who is tasked with managing all commercial matters, bi-annual audits (where required) and contracts.
  • Driver engagement: Improved training materials for drivers. We are working on improving our materials to make it easier for drivers to stay up to date with easy-to-access training material.

We’d love to speak with you about partnership, or how we can help, whether you’ve worked with us previously, currently or not. Please feel free to get in touch with Tom on [email protected] or messaging him on DTE’s Coachbook platform.