So you wanna to be a Glacier Red Bus Driver?  Part 7:  The Color of Money

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.

Not sure how many people remember the movie The Color of Money with Paul Newman and a very young Tom Cruise.  With Martin Scorses as the director, and Eric Clapton singing the theme song, why haven’t your heard of it?  Well, because it came out just a couple of months after Top Gun in late 1986, and that movie (along with Aliens) kind of dominated theaters summer and fall of that wonderful year of my youth. 

I recall it because Clapton’s music video took a lot of cuts from the movie.  And that video was playing on a small dive-bar television in the college town of Cheney, WA.  And I was there.  Playing pool and sipping my first legal beer on my 21st birthday.

But to be honest, that tagline doesn’t work for this post.  I should have gone with Show Me the Money!

I’ll be curious to see the stats on this particular post.  Because everyone wants to know how much money you can make at this very demanding (and potentially personally rewarding OR demoting) summer job.  And no driver will ever talk about it.  Why?

Simply because there is no benchmark.  A Jammer doesn’t know if they are on the upper end and just killing it (and potentially bragging which is not cool).  Or if they are on the bottom end and really really suck (and their ego is getting beaten like a cheap pinata every day for nothing). 

I’ve dropped little crumbs of data here and there in prior posts. And repeated myself a couple of times just for good reader retention.  But now it’s time to put it all together. And add even MORE detail on how I broke it all down.  Be it right, wrong, or indifferent.  So let’s just cut to the chase.

My math shows that the average Red Bus driver will probably gross about 5k per month, +/- 20%. There are clearly a LOT of variables that must be taken into consideration. But if that’s all you wanted to know, no need to scroll any further.  But you will.  Like with watching any trainwreck.

A quick reiteration: I’m talking GROSS here. Everyone has different income tax liabilities. Everyone has different lodging expenses.  Maybe you are claiming a dozen exemptions.  Maybe you are in an RV, a cabin, or a dorm. Maybe you eat exclusively in the employee dining room. Or occasionally. Or not at all. Some drivers even live locally and just commute from their homes each morning.  Most are retired with lower tax exposure.  Therefore, I’ll be staying away from estimating any take-home numbers.

The Season

First, let’s discuss just exactly what constitutes a seasonal commitment at Glacier. Well, the buses start to run at the lower elevations in mid-May and end in the higher elevations around mid-Sept. To maximize, one might want to onboard everyone in mid-May and roll them off in mid-Sept for a total of four months.

In reality, the volume of tours slowly builds in the spring and falls off kind of quickly in the autumn. As such, drivers are staggered in starting mid-May all the way until the end of June. So there will be drivers with contracts for four, three, or even two months. Some local old-time returning drivers just get behind the wheel for July and August (best touring and tipping), and leave the shoulder seasons (with all of the startup and shutdown duties) to the new folks.

A part of your contract time is spent training. They just don’t hand you the keys to a million-dollar bus and say knock ’em dead (although at times it seemed that way). There is an actual training schedule. For first-year drivers, that will be 3 weeks. During that time, you are getting your CDL, learning commentary, and doing some practice driving. This means no touring with paying customers, and none of the lucrative tips that make up the vast majority of your income. Yeah, most of the first month is just time-clock hours. Ouch.  But some people learned how to work that clock quite well.

But a returning driver has just one week of training. They only have to retake (EVERY YEAR) the five days of policy, procedure, first aid, and HR stuff. These people start to tour almost immediately. Couple extra weeks of pulling in tips. Ca-Ching!  The second season is always better (if you are there solely to earn of course).

The Hours

About 40% of your gross will come from hours. The majority of clocked hours will be done while touring (or pre/post bus procedures, cleaning, fueling). These are the prime money hours, as I like to call them. Take all the hours you can earn tips.

But if you are there in early May, there are more clock hours sans tours than you might think. All the buses have to be pulled from storage, cleaned, waxed, and driven empty to their locations all over the park. There are 33 buses, so that is going to take a LOT of drivers and a LOT of non-tipping hours to get everything where it needs to be for the season (and back home at the end of the season).

Recall early season tours are starting in May. These are routes more along the edges of the Park while they wait for Logan Pass to open on the Going to the Sun Road (which is targeted for mid-June each year). Not the most exciting, but tipping tours nonetheless. And with 40% of your gross coming from hours, you want to start pulling in that other 60% ASAP.

Depending on how many drivers are onboarded, and how many tours are sold, you could be doing a ton of early tours and making money. Or very possibly, none at all. If not enough tours, a Red Bus driver fills in for the employee shuttle shifts and even does HR runs. HR runs are when new employees need to be picked up from their point of entry (airport, train/bus station) and taken to their working location anywhere in the Park. And of course the reverse at the end of the season.

There are other non-tip drives as well. Taking a bus back to the garage for maintenance or repair. Taking employees on grocery runs. Maybe a bi-monthly trip to a Walmart for employee shopping. Or even having to burn an entire day driving a Red Bus EMPTY because you had to go back to the shop all the way from the East side for a random drug test. Yes. I passed.

There are also times when you have to dead-head. Let’s say I’m on the East Side and I’m assigned a West side tour because they are short drivers. I may have to drive over empty, do that tour, and drive back over empty. Now you have a 12-hour day, with only a couple of money hours to earn. But, I must admit, it is really fun driving the old bus empty with the top down on a wonderful sunny day. But those trips do not add as much to the bottom line.

So how much non-tipping driving can you expect? I didn’t capture the hours, but I did log the miles driven empty (not associated with a tour). I put on 5808 total miles last summer. Of those 1284 were non-touring. So basically, you can expect that during the season about 20% of your driving time will not have an opportunity to earn tips. Double ouch.

The Tips

We have discussed this in great detail in a prior post. About 60% (to 2/3rds) of your gross will come from tips. Those are in the form of cash, and also a taxable gratuity line item on your check called BELLGRAT. Remember, BELLGRAT comes exclusively from group tours where the tip was paid for in the overall cost of the tour upfront. The math never comes out the same, and it will make Regan-omics look like a viable and sustainable economic policy.

Now, remember my roommate, who decided just to not give commentary and drive his guests around for hours in awkward silence? If 42% of his income stream was from hours, and 26% from an automatic BELLGRAT gratuity, why talk? If you can get 68% of your pay for not doing the most challenging part of the job, why not?

He still got cash tips because there are a lot of people who feel compelled to tip regardless of service. Especially if it’s their first Red Bus Ride and they don’t KNOW the service they SHOULD get. Factor in some pity cash, and now we are talking 75+% for NOT doing your job.

So if you are the rare Red Bus slacker, at the end of a four-month season you only gross only 16K and not 20K. Hmmm. Plus your only stress the whole summer was hitting on the park ranger lady at Logan Pass every day for eight weeks and having her finally say NO get the **** away from me (I was there. It was AWESOME!).

I’ve got to give him credit. He’s either the laziest guy I’ve ever met or the most brilliant. But at the end of the day, I’d rather lay my head to rest every night with a conscience and integrity. Cheating people out an experience your job was to give in one of the most beautiful places in the world has some really bad Karma attached to it. And that stuff comes back around.

My Experience

I worked a 3-month season. Because of the school year, I couldn’t start until June and had to be back by Labor Day. That put me in the money months of June, July, and August. I think that is the true sweet spot for the job. Note there was a three-week late opening of Logan Pass, but I don’t think those cancellations hurt the East side as much as the West (or my math.).

But let’s just say I did work the 4-month season of mid-May to mid-Sept. Would my 40/60 ratio of hours to tips hold? Better yet, would my 5K gross per month +/- 20% hold?

That extra month would be the last two weeks in May, and the first two in Sept. Remember in May, there are a lot of employees coming in, getting the buses out of the garage, and lots of just moving people around. Early tours start, but if the weather isn’t good, or supporting facilities like restaurants and shops are slow to open, there might not be much volume.

Case in point, Jammer K started early in May. He had a lot of six-day weeks. At one time did FIVE full-day Crown tours back to back, and was doing all kinds of HR employee onboarding and shopping runs. A ton of hours, and for the most part good tipping runs. But that can take a toll on you fast.

In early Sept, you have the opposite. Drivers are completing contracts and leaving. The weather can get very bad and stay that way. Now you have to get all of the buses back to the shop and employees to the airport. Tours start slowing down after Labor day.

So again, depending on the number of drivers and the number of tours still being sold, I think the 5k month gross will hold. But the ratio of hours to tips would probably reverse 60/40, or at a minimum balance out at 50/50. And I can tell you now, in my personal opinion, this job is NOT worth working for the hourly rate (even with overtime). I’ve only got so many hours left in my life and I value them.

Now with all of that being said, if I were to work that extra month, I would definitely want to be working on the West side of the Park. Remember, every time you have to return a bus to the shop it is a 140-mile round trip for an East sider. An East side HR run to the airport can be a 350-mile day if you have to pick up employees from all of Xanterra’s hotels/property.

The pay-per-seat tour ratio is a whopping 6:1 for the West side versus the East side. This means potentially (and probably) a LOT more opportunity for touring with tips, and LESS shuttling employees and empty buses for many hours and hundreds of miles on end.

Once more, this is from my experience and the metrics I collected. I’m sure some Jammers are getting better tips than I did. I’m sure many logged a lot more hours than I did. Maybe my gross estimate for the average is way off. Possibly it’s too high. Or should be +/- 50%.

I don’t really care. It’s fun writing openly about what no one with this job will ever talk about. But it’s a big part of the experience of being a Red Bus driver, and I’m glad that I could share it. Now it’s truly time to wrap up this category. You have almost made it to the finish line. One more post.

Bonus fact: Montana State Income Tax does get a little bit of your paycheck. But, if you are a season non-resident, you can file for ALL of that back. Of course, for me, it was only about $213 bucks. All it cost me was filling out an MT one-page tax form and a stamp. Now, remember, Xanterra tries to hire 750 seasonal employees to run all of GNP operations (with 150 of those being foreign students).

How many seasonal people (most bouncing from job to job and state to state) do you really think file for their Montana withholding back? Hmmmm. And think how many other non-resident season workers in other tourist operations there are across the ENTIRE state in the same boat? Hmmmm.

There is some real refundable tax money being left in the coffers of the Treasure State. One of those things you would never hear about outside of Jammer Confidential!! 🙂