Tempo traveller or bus? The per-head crossover point

At some point, booking lots of tempo travellers stops making sense, and hardly anyone notices when they've crossed that line. People think of a bus as the big, expensive option. Per person, it's actually the other way round.

So where does a bus start to win?

The cost per seat drops a lot as you go from the 12-seater to the 20-seater, and then it pretty much levels off. From 20 seats up, everything lands between ₹1.13 and ₹1.20. So once you're more than twenty people, it's really not about money any more. It's about what can get where, and how you want to move the group.

A worked comparison at 45 people

Let's take a real example: forty-five people, one 250 km day.

The bus comes out about ₹4,950 cheaper than the tempo travellers for that one day, and the gap keeps growing on a longer trip. It also turns up as one group, not three. For a wedding party or a school trip, that honestly matters more than the money.

At ₹1.13 per person per km, a seat on the 45-seater is the cheapest one we've got. Fill it, and nothing else in the fleet comes close.

When the bus isn't the answer

That said, there are three times when the per-head maths goes out of the window.

• Empty seats. Put thirty people in a 45-seater and you're paying ₹1.70 a head, which is worse than a 26-seater. The numbers only work if the bus is full.
• Getting into the old city. Anything with 40 seats or more can't go down Varanasi's inner lanes. It parks at Godowlia or Maidagin and everyone walks from there. With forty people, that's a headcount and an extra twenty minutes each way, every time.
• Different timings. If half your group wants to leave at another time, one big vehicle stops being a saving and starts being a headache. That's when two tempo travellers really do win.

The practical rule

Here's what we tell people on the phone. Under twenty of you, take whichever tempo traveller fits; the 17-seater's the sweet spot and it's even cheaper per km than the 12. Twenty to thirty, go for the 20 or 26-seater, it costs about the same per head and you dodge the bus parking hassle. Over thirty-five and all going to the same places? Take the bus, and let us plan where it parks.

One thing people forget on bus days

Add half an hour to every drive inside the city. A 49-seater crawls through Varanasi's bottlenecks, and a timetable written for a car will be running late by mid-morning and never catch up. That's not the bus's fault. It's just what happens when you move forty-nine people at once.