About us

About BusOffer.com

BusOffer.com grew out of frustration. Anyone who needed a coach with a driver filled in the same form at every coach company, then waited for separate emails that trickled in days later, if they arrived at all. You could hardly call it comparing: you put four answers side by side that all meant something different. This site was built to solve that one thing.

Set up by Martijn Smeets
Racks B.V. · KVK 74865684
Oosterlaan 24, Heemstede
hallo@busoffer.com

Martijn Smeets

Founder

Years ago Martijn was co-owner of bushurenvergelijker.nl and touringcarhurenvergelijker.nl, and he knows the coach business from both sides: the customer who calls and the company that calls back.

Who else is behind it

The problem we started with

Hiring a coach is not an everyday task. Most people who do it (a parent on the school trip committee, the secretary of a club, someone organising the staff outing) do it once a year or once in their life. They don't know what a trip should cost, what is and isn't included in the price, and whether that one offer is expensive or cheap. There is nothing to compare if you don't know what to compare it with.

The hard part: doing the sums ourselves

To show a price before anyone asks for anything, you have to be able to do a coach company's sums yourself. Not an average or a 'from' price, but this coach, on this route, on this date. There is a lot in it: the fixed costs, the hours driven and the hours the driver spends waiting.

The drive out from that company's depot. Tolls and vignettes per country, an overnight stay if the day gets too long, and the surcharge that comes with a Saturday in July. That is the heavy part of this site, and it is also the only part that really matters.

Every amount you see comes from that one calculation, using the rates the coach company has entered itself, or our standard rate as long as a company hasn't done so yet, and then that is stated next to the price.

The rules we set ourselves

No figure without a source. If there is no review for a company, then there is no review. No star appears out of thin air, and no response time we haven't measured.
No top spot for sale. Coach companies that take part only pay us when a trip via BusOffer.com actually goes ahead, every company on the same terms. So money cannot change the order.
No price without a trip. You only see amounts once you have entered your route, date and group size, because an amount without those three is not a price but bait.
No amount that doesn't match the calculation. Every figure on this site comes from the same price calculation as the amount on the offer itself.

Where the companies come from

The coach companies on this site come from the public licence register for bus and coach transport: the official list of everyone allowed to operate a coach in the Netherlands. Some of these companies have signed up with us, set their rates and been checked by us for licence, insurance and registration with the KVK (the Dutch Chamber of Commerce). They can give you a price straight away. The rest are listed too, with only what we can point to from public sources and their own website, without a price, because we don't know it. What we don't know isn't there.

Who is behind BusOffer.com

One human and two computer programs. That sounds like a joke, and it is exactly how it works: the decisions are made by a human, the building and the first answer to your question are not.

Martijn Smeets

Founder

Years ago Martijn was co-owner of bushurenvergelijker.nl and touringcarhurenvergelijker.nl, and he knows the coach business from both sides: the customer who calls and the company that calls back. BusOffer.com is his answer to what never worked properly there: that as a customer you could never get two prices side by side, and that a coach company was responding to quote requests without knowing where it stood. He decides what gets built, what goes on the site and what deliberately does not.

Bitje

The programmerNot a human

Bitje writes the site. Every button, every calculation and every email on BusOffer.com was typed by Bitje and checked by Martijn. Bitje doesn't sleep, never complains about a request on a Sunday evening, and has the bad habit of writing a long screed with every change about why it had to be done that way. Nobody reads it, and it is exactly why the site keeps doing what it should.

Praatje

The helpdeskNot a human

The blue button at the bottom right, that's Praatje. Ask your question and you get an answer straight away, from our own texts, because Praatje may not claim anything that isn't written here. If no good answer comes out, there is a button below the conversation to put your question to a human after all, with the whole conversation already attached. Then Martijn reads it.

Why this is here: it is more honest than pretending there is an office full of staff. Anyone who knows where an answer comes from also knows when to bring in a human. And there is one, always, via the contact form.

Who comes here

Primary schools and clubs, event agencies, staff associations, wedding couples, choirs, companies with a team day. Anyone who sometimes arranges transport for a group and doesn't want to lose half a working week over it.

Where our data comes from

The places and addresses suggested by the search form come from two public sources. For the Netherlands, that is the national address register (the BAG, the Dutch register of addresses and buildings) through the PDOK Locatieserver: all towns, streets and house numbers, with their coordinates. We also use it to work out the distance of your trip.

For the rest of Europe, we use a list of 69,789 places in 52 countries from GeoNames (geonames.org). That list is shared under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), and we read it on 27 September 2026.

How it works from start to finish