So you wanna to be a Glacier Red Bus Driver? Part 5: The Art of the Tip

DISCLAIMER: Everything in this series is solely based on my own personal experience as a Red Bus tour driver in Glacier Park. The metrics from which I derive many of my insights and conclusions are based specifically on my abilities and performance alone. As with driving a car, your mileage WILL vary.

I had a party of 8 on a half-day afternoon Eastern Alpine Tour up to Logan Pass and back. All older kids and adults. A real family outing. I knew what to do. Hit all of the great turnouts. Did the small hike to a fantastic point with sweeping views. Grabbed their phone and took tons of photos for the holidays. Spoiler Alert in the photo.

Good banter and all-around good fun. They totally got me. At the end of the trip, the Dad said he had the best tour of his life. Got so much more than the expected. Big handshake. No tip.

Hmmmmm……. I guess since Dad spent $64 x 8 = $512.00 on the tour, that must have been the whole family budget. Nothing left for the guy who actually crafted a wonderful family experience. Or maybe he was just really challenged with math.

Then I had a mid-40s couple. Only taking the East side tour because all the ones on the West side were booked for that particular day. Barbara (don’t recall the husband’s name) was very inquisitive. A lot of questions. And I answered them all.

Gave them tons of history/fauna/flora like I always do. When she tipped at the end of the tour, I could feel it was a single folded bill. I never look at the gratuity, just put it in my pocket. A twenty for a couple is pretty standard. If you did a really good job x2. And if I really knocked it out of the park x3. A single? Hmmm.

So, when counting tips for the day, it felt short. I remembered Barbra’s tip in my back pocket. The paper felt funny. Yep, my first hundred-dollar bill. And I still have it. Always will because it makes me smile.

Then I panicked. Checked ALL of my pockets. If she slipped me a room key too, I’m in big trouble. But no, all was good. I had not become a prostitute. At least, not yet.

The best part about this story? The group and the couple were on the SAME TOUR at the SAME TIME. Yep. Same stops along the Sun Road, the same little hike to a great viewpoint, the same narrative, the same weather. And yet the gratuity couldn’t be more different.

I gathered lots of metrics around this. Tried to game it. Is a bus full of couples better than one with groups of 4 or 6 or 8 or 10? Are families worse than a group of friends? Does the seat on the Red Bus they sit in matter? Older versus younger. Country of origin. And yeah, please don’t hate me, but even ethnicity.

I took two semesters of statistics in college for my business major and LOVED it. Correlating seemingly unrelated things and crunching data on an IBM Digital mainframe the size of a large refrigerator that could now be done with a Smart Watch (well, it was the 80s). All to calculate that magnificent Chi-Square. Amazing fun? Nerd? Yeah, bite me.

Over three months I gave 57 tours, transported 763 tourists, and drove 5,808 miles on one of the scariest roads in America. And my conclusion?

People are ******* weird. You have NO idea who will tip what. So don’t even try. There is NO way to maximize other than to be yourself, give your personal best, and just not care.

Be a constant, and be good at your craft. Those that you truly connect with will never forget what you gave. Those that don’t see or recognize the value you have given to their experience, are most likely never satisfied with anything in life. Their loss, not yours (well, other than financially, which is kinda a big deal).

Drive your drive and enjoy the ride. Positive people attract even more positive energy.

I cannot leave this post without touching on just how critical tips are to a Red Bus Driver. The hourly rate is starving. And to be honest, incredibly embarrassing given what it takes to get and hold the required CDL (with the DOT passenger endorsement).

When I look at the math (don’t even start me on the empirical evidence) and take my total gross for the season, only 42.5% came from hourly earnings. Remember, you are working 50-hour weeks at a minimum. So roughly 60% comes from tips. Or even more roughly, let’s round up to 2/3rds. Wow. That is huge.

And not all tips are the same. There are two flavors of Jammer tips. The first of course is cash. The wonderful stuff that Uncle Sam doesn’t get a bite of because it’s not ‘real.’

The other is a unique beast I’ve touched on before. Let’s call it BELLGRAT. At least, that is the title of the line item on your check. It is a taxable value that is short for Bellman Gratuity. I’m guessing that Xanterra did not want to change the field name in their generic out-of-the-box payroll software for a specific gratuity in Glacier Park. Fair. But I know what I do when technology confuses me.

I will dig into the different types of tours in the next post. But BELLGRAT is specific only to group tours and is what I like to call a ‘baked-in’ gratuity. When group tours come to GNP, they don’t pay a per-seat rate like on the other in-house tours. There is a special matrix that factors in passengers, miles, duration, and all kinds of things.

This big bulk Red Bus rate makes them attractive to the mega travel tour companies that create those seven-day lump-sum extravaganzas that the affluent older crowd loves so much. So BELLGRAT is good tip money because you get it regardless of your performance. You just never know how much it will be.

The math is very fuzzy. I’ve heard they put into the group tour bus tip rate anywhere from 10-15% for the driver. Some tours pay more, some less. I saw travel companies that push 20 tours a summer thru Glacier. Others may be one or two. I am sure they pay per volume and frequency.

Then the math gets fuzzier yet. So every two-week pay period, they take the total BELLGRAT collected, and divide it by the TOTAL group tour hours that ALL the bus drivers drove. Easier than assigning each tour gratuity to each driver.

Result? You see BELLGRAT tips on your check up to two weeks AFTER you did the actual group tours. Big lump sum. No idea what you got for what tour. No validation. No connection to the people. Magic money you get for just driving the bus?

A lot of Red Bus drivers discount the group tour tip value since they didn’t get the immediate gratification of the cash in the palm from tours sold per seat. Therefore most preferred the latter. But the math shows something different.

If I tax up my cash tips so we can make all numbers pretax gross for calculations, the breakdown of my season gross was 42% hours, 32% cash tips, and 26% BELLGRAT.

Now those group tours were right at 50% of my total tours and 46% of my total passengers. Few Red Bus Drivers realized this. I also got cash tips with every group tour I did. Sure, the tip was already included and they didn’t have to. Sure, sometimes it might only be a total of 15-20 bucks (and a lot of Canadian coins).

I saw the tip from every group tour as an expression of appreciation and affirmation that they really had a great time. That was all I needed. Often I got more than they expected. And very often I got a better cash tip from my all-day per-seat non-group tours. Hmmmmm.

The math now changes. If I factor in group tour cash tips with my paycheck BELLGRAT, I find that group tours were a whopping 38% of my tips and the per-seat tours were only 20%. And group trip tours were sooooo much more enjoyable!

People on a group trip are already bonded and interacted well with each other. They don’t mind being crammed in tight vintage touring buses with their friends. They are just looking for an experience and you give them one.

Group tours are never very long, ranging from 1.5 hours up to 6 (of actual touring time, the total work day is of course longer). They generally tended to be an older clientele, and I’ve found this tourist demographic LOVES to hear history and not corny jokes. The best part: group tours commonly require 2-4 Red Buses. So you get to spend time with other drivers and see their tour techniques. A total win-win-win experience.

The big question all of you are asking is what am I supposed to tip a Red Bus Driver? I was fortunate enough to have a woman actually asked me this once. She was not on one of my tours, but it made me stop and think. And I was honest based on my experience.

As I said above, $20 for a couple was pretty standard. And even single riders on a bad weather day would give at least $5 to the cause (interesting enough, most of those were in their 20s. Tipping culture?).

This woman must have spent time as a server or in hospitality, as her response to me was $10 per rider should be standard and $5 a rider the bare minimum. Of course, anything more is based on the experience the individual rider had with the driver. And I would agree.

But I had my share of tours of 16 people where I didn’t clear the would-be scathing minimum of $80 bucks. And I gave it my all. But what does the math say? Let’s look at the Law of Large Numbers. Did I measure up?

When I take my total riders and gross pre-tax tips, I come out at $11.46 per. When I take out the tax factor to bring it all to a true cash value, I’m at $9.17. So I guess this kinda sorta supports my findings and assumptions?

So am I an average tour driver? Or do I suck? Am I better than most? What is the benchmark? Who knows. I might have to go back for another season and find out. And take all of the group tours I can get my hands on (shhhhhhhhh. My secret!).