At what point does a road trip become a hassle? And what’s the threshold at which the scale tips between “Do we take the car?” and “Do we brave the airport?” What’s the sweet spot of the Venn diagram crossing the circles of time, distance, money and sanity?

The folks at Vonlane found those answers to be about 200 miles, roughly three hours and between $119-139, one-way.

The Texas-based Vonlane, a luxury coach travel service catering to individual riders rather than group rentals since 2014, opened its Nashville hub in November 2022 with an initial route to and from Atlanta. It added Memphis service to and from Memphis in late May.

Vonlane coaches feature 22 first class-style leather seats (though engineered quite differently from an airplane seat, see sidebar) staggered through the cabin in a 2-1 configuration, offsetting passenger rows to help maximize a sense of privacy.

There’s complimentary Wi-Fi, as well as a dedicated attendant facilitating snacks, meals, beverages and other amenities analogous to airline travels.

The Nashville routes depart from the Omni Nashville hotel on Rep. John Lewis Way South downtown, and arrive in Atlanta at the Grand Hyatt in Buckhead or in Memphis at the Hilton Memphis on Ridge Lake Boulevard near the east side of I-240 near Germantown.

Using luxury hotel brands as departure points – rather than asking customers to navigate airport or bus terminal access – is one of the many pain points Vonlane seeks to eliminate.

And Vonlane CEO Alex Danza says the company was ready to help solve those points for Nashville travelers a couple of years before their buses actually started rolling in Tennessee.

Vonlane CEO Alex Danza says Nashville would have had service sooner if not for COVID.

-- Photograph Provided

“When the pandemic hit (in March 2020), we were four weeks away from launching in Nashville,” Danza says. “We had everything set to go. We had people hired, we had deals with hotel partners. Everything was done. And then the world kind of changed, and we couldn’t start a new route in this environment. So we put it on hold.”

Vonlane has historically been very deliberate in adding routes and increased departure availability, even before COVID restructured the travel industry. Danza says the company’s origins grew out of the complexity of business travel between the Texas cities of Dallas and Austin, later adding Houston, Fort Worth and San Antonio to the mix.

“We started putting the company together in 2013, taking about nine months to get the first motor coaches built, and started operations in May of 2014,” he says. “The reason for starting the business was to give Texas travelers an alternative to flying Southwest Airlines or jumping in their car and driving themselves between our major cities.

“All of our cities are about 200, 250 miles apart from each other, and it’s just kind of a coin toss of do I go to the airport and deal with the security line and wait at the gate and all that stuff for a 50-minute flight, or do I just drive myself and have my car with me?”

When it came time to look at non-Texas options for growth, the similar-sized stretch between the population centers of Nashville and Atlanta, combined with anecdotally chaotic air travel between the two cities, made for a perfect expansion market. Until the world shut down for a time.

Vonlane also gets around the negative image of a bus terminal by picking up and dropping off Nashville passengers at the Omni Hotel next to Music City Center and the Country Music Hal of Fame.

-- Photo By Ruth Kennedy | The Ledger

“We took a tremendous sucker punch from the pandemic, as you can imagine, being in the travel space,” Danza says. “We actually wound up shutting the company down for six weeks, completely shutting down and going to zero.

“And so we say we’ve built it twice now,” Danza laughs. “From April of ’20 to November of ’22, it took us that long just to build Texas back to what it was before the pandemic. And then we were ready to come to Nashville.”

New routes, new growth

Six months later, the company launched the Memphis route, a move transit researcher Joe Schwieterman says might signal Vonlane’s future expansion plans.

“By launching the Nashville-Memphis service, they may have tipped their hand that more national service could be coming,” says Schwieterman, director of DePaul University’s Chaddick Institute for Metropolitan Development and a co-author of the institute’s annual Intercity Bus Review.

“Nashville-to-Memphis doesn’t have a highly established or a large air travel market, so you don’t have many refugees from airlines who just want to avoid getting in a pressurized cabin one more time. You have a lot of air travelers, Houston to Dallas, that are just very tired of it. So the Memphis route seems to be an experiment by Vonlane to try something a little different.”

Coaches are outfitted with overhead displays for safety videos. The rest of the run is quiet.

-- Photo By Ruth Kennedy

Nashville travelers briefly had another option for individual private coach travel, as the company Napaway ran a single commercial route from Music City to Washington D.C., an overnight service that Schwieterman’s 2023 report called “one of the biggest stories in U.S. bus travel last year.”

Napaway’s buses feature seats similar to business class on long-haul airline flights, but the company suspended its only regular route earlier this year, choosing to focus on private rentals of their fleet to larger groups.

“The sleeper pod/private suite arrangements are highly attractive, even in the groups that don’t necessarily sleep on the bus. So a sports team can go to an away game or something and still have a premium on privacy,” Schwieterman says.

“Napaway is in an enviable position to have a head start on all its competitors with this private-suite model. The buses are really modular, too, so you can change it from big private suites to smaller ones.”

Schwieterman credits Vonlane with taking a chance on a slightly different makeup of a route outside its home market, knowing the timeframe commitment it takes for such an endeavor to bear fruit.

“These routes take months, if not years, to mature. So it’s still too early to know how viable the Nashville services are. It often takes a corporate policy decision where they re-look at it every couple of years,” he says.

“Building brand awareness is extraordinarily difficult, particularly in driving-focused towns. Vonlane doesn’t appear on major bus travel booking platforms, and the company carefully guards its image. It doesn’t appear to be interested in being listed alongside Greyhound and other conventional options.”

“Vonlane doesn’t want to just have a niche. They want to make a splash with frequent, heavily publicized routes, and recent expansions in Texas suggest they aren’t just looking for two or three trips a day, but they want to give customers many more options.”

More equals more?

Danza says the Nashville routes will be getting a similar kind of expansion in January as the company will increase the frequency of departures from all three markets it’s currently serving in the Southeast. He says it’s a move that, in the past, has accelerated ridership, rather than waiting for existing routes to get overcrowded.

“We’re going to double the schedule on both Nashville-Memphis and Nashville-Atlanta starting the first Friday in January,” Danza says, bumping up from the current four weekday departure windows in each market. “So there’ll be more departures, more variety for people on the times of day that they can travel with us, which always increases our ridership.

“Whenever we add more seats, we actually get a lift in our ridership numbers because people just like to see they have more options and they’re more apt to book when there’s a lot more options on both sides of their trip for them to choose from.”

The increase in frequency is something that would appeal to past passengers like Kerry Graham, who used the service not long after its Nashville-Atlanta launch in November 2022 for a more utilitarian purpose than simply business or leisure travel.

“I’m from the Atlanta area, my parents are elderly and I went down to see them, get their car and drive them back to Nashville,” says Graham, founder and CEO of the specialized marketing firm The Brand Hotel. “So when I went, I had no expectations other than what the marketing said.”

The Vonlane service gained an instant evangelist.

“I loved it,” she says. “I really loved it. I mean, first of all, anytime I get on a plane or a bus or anything and there’s engine noise, I’m asleep. So it was a great luxury,” Graham says. “I thought the leg room was great, the Wi-Fi was good. I was kind of stunned at how much food they brought you, and that the food was good.”

Vonlane’s research team hopes daily to stumble across someone with Graham’s viewpoint: Previous long-haul bus-riding experience as a younger person, and someone who’s had to deal with the rigors of a regular Atlanta-to-Nashville commute for business.

“My prior experience (with buses) had been when I was going to Vanderbilt and I took a different brand of bus back and forth to Atlanta, and that was not nearly as enjoyable as this one was,” Graham says. “I used to commute from Atlanta to Nashville every week by plane, and this would be much better than that.

“I was exhausted doing the plane, and I much prefer this just for the time, but also there’s no jostling, you’re in your seat, you don’t have to wait in line and all those things, whether it’s TSA or standing at a Southwest gate.”

Graham says he’s told anyone who needs the kind of service Vonlane provides to give it a shot.

“Bus (travel) is not a normal thing for a lot of people in terms of long distance,” he says. “It has whatever stigma it had in the (past), but it’s just that you’ve got to experience it and really see that somebody has rethought it and it’s changed and it’s enjoyable.”