School Bookings

We’d like to provide you with some information that will hopefully make your everyday dealings with O’Driscoll Coaches easier and to clarify some of our policies and procedures.
Our office staff are available for bookings and enquiries from 8.30am until 4.30pm Monday to Friday.

We would prefer to receive your bookings online by filling out the School Charter Form online, or by email, so as to avoid any errors that sometimes occur with verbal bookings. Our email address is enquiries@derwentvalleylink.com.au. Online and email bookings will be returned with confirmation of your booking.

Wheelchair accessible buses

We have a limited number of wheelchair accessible buses available for school charters. These buses are able to accommodate two wheel chairs and up to 48 passengers. Please check with our staff for availability.

 

Seat belt equipped buses

We have available for school charters several buses equipped with 57 seat belted seats. These vehicles are ideal for school camps with large under floor luggage capacity.

Bus operations

Most of the buses used for your charter bookings are required for passenger services in the morning and afternoon. This means that they are not generally available before 8.45am or after 3.00pm. We require your assistance in the afternoon period to ensure our buses are not late for their service runs. When booking your pick up and return times please advise your actual departure times from school and the destination. Our drivers will endeavour to be on site 10 minutes before the departure time. Please be mindful that we have a contractual obligation to ensure our passenger services run on time. However we do have a small number of buses available outside of these hours when required.

 

Cancellations

Report fees are charged only if a bus or buses arrive at a school to carry out a booking and the booking has not been previously cancelled. Schools may cancel any weekday booking up to 30 mins prior to booked departure time without penalty. No report fee will be charged if cancellation is due to inclement weather. Weekend bookings need to be cancelled by 4.00pm on the Friday before the booking.

FAQs

It is always our preference to have the bus stay with your group. On busy days this isn’t always possible as we try to accommodate as many groups as possible.
We will always give preference to primary school groups and make special arrangements if the weather becomes inclement.

 

It is important that we know how many people will be travelling. Our buses range in size from 24 to 61 seats. Most buses also have standing capacity. When we know the numbers we will send the appropriate number and size of buses required. When moving large numbers of students please ensure that all buses are filled to capacity before asking the driver to leave. We can also seat 3 to a seat for primary schools to help keep your costs down.

Yes, we have several buses available for camps with plenty of luggage capacity.

Our drivers routinely inspect their buses at the conclusion of each trip. Any lost property not claimed from the driver will be returned to our office for storage for a period of 3 months after which it will be disposed of.

We employ our own full time mechanics who carry out regular scheduled maintenance at our New Norfolk service facility. The buses are required to pass regular statutory inspections. Each driver is responsible for maintaining a high level of cleanliness in his/her bus.

Despite the best of intentions when you have many people on a bus one or two inevitably will drop some of their lollies or food or spill a little of their drink. This can make things quite uncomfortable for the next hirer of the bus especially if they sit on something left on the seat. There are also the inevitable wrappers that our drivers must sweep up and dispose of.

We endeavour to be a one stop shop so that you only need to make one booking request. For our regular customers if we cannot fit your booking in we will ask another company to help us out. There is no extra charge if we engage another company to pick you up on our behalf.

If the bus is late it is usually out of the driver’s control. Our drivers will have many different bookings on a typical day. So as to accommodate as many groups as possible our drivers’ schedules are sometimes quite tight. Our operations department will schedule drivers assuming groups will depart on time. If a group is late, even if it is only ten minutes, this may affect their ability to reach their next booking on time. We will always endeavour to advise your group if the bus is going to be late. Or of course, it may be simply the traffic. It does not take much of an incident to affect traffic flow around Hobart and at peak times congestion gets worse seemingly on a weekly basis.

The sooner the better! Some schools book their end of year excursions in February! For events where many schools are likely to attend or for large groups we advise at least a month before.