School buses or just transportation in general!

How about the bigger bus type non school. They have vans in Chicago that move 22, 32 or 44 People. Trolleys seem to be popular too. I also know someone who rented a passenger van and hired a friend of her nephews to drive people back and forth.

We booked school buses for transportation from our hotel to venue (and back). We did two buses for about 110 guests. We only had one pickup from hotel (2pm) and one pickup from venue (930pm). It was about a 30-40 minute drive each way.


It was around $1500 + $200 tip ($50 per bus per trip). If we did an executive shuttle with private bathrooms, we were getting quotes around $****.
For the wedding party, we did executive sprinter vans — two for on the way to the venue (Two 14-passenger vans). Then we did a bigger one that fit like 36 people from venue back to the hotel. That cost $1000.

We’re doing school buses for ours! They’re definitely the cheapest transportation by far - I reached out to trolleys, shuttles, charter buses, coach buses school buses etc. all of those ended up being 800-1200 per bus! But the school bus was about 500 per bus. Each bus company is different but for us almost every company required either a 3 or more hour rental or full day included (a 1 hour rental wouldn’t make them money; it would essentially cost more for them to do that) but things like #of destination points, trips during timeframe, etc. factor into the final price.

We did a school bus and a coach bus. The school bus was definitely cheaper. It will depend on you area but I think it was like $800 vs like $1200 for the coach. I think that covered the duration of pickup - drop off. I also found you needed to be renting them for an extended period because it wouldn’t make much sense to only pay for the active driving time considering they’ll need to drive to you location and back to the depot etc. I would just remember that there’s no AC most school buses and the seats are a bit smaller since they’re meant for 2 kids, not 2 adults, so I would be cautious with capacity estimates! They were a good option for our 15 min drive from hotels to our venue because it was affordable and a bit of fun

View Quoted Comment Yes that makes total sense! I figured that's why they had minimum hours for booking!
This might sound dumb but
If our ceremony starts at 4:30pm and ends at 10:30pm, and we have the bus pick the guests up at 4pm at the hotel, and picks them up at the barn at 11pm, would we be paying for the 7 hours? And if that's the case, does the bus stay on premises?
Sorry if that's a really stupid question! Idk why I'm so confused and overwhelmed about this whole topic!!

View Quoted Comment That's what I hear! When I look up charter buses online, it all quoted about 1k+ for the 7 hours of rental that we are estimating (4pm pick up/ 11pm drop off)


When you booked your school bus, did you end up just choosing a full day for the pick up and drop off?

View Quoted Comment Wow!! $1500 and $4000 is a huge difference!! Good to know!!
It's just such a big expense that I wasn't even considering!

View Quoted Comment The passenger van with a friend actually sounds like a good idea! We have a few family members and friends that doesn't drink so maybe we could leave this open as an option!

View Quoted Comment Yup!! We were shocked! Lol


And I was worried it would look “tacky” being yellow school buses, but people didn’t care— it did it’s job of getting them from point A to B and it was free transportation for our guests.
This was for San Diego county in California btw.