Final stop for 'Middleton tours'
Mortons Travel will run its final coach tour around Bucklebury on Saturday, mainly owing to a lack of interest
A TRAVEL firm from Little London is to run its third and final coach tour around the Bucklebury area Kate Middleton grew up on Saturday (March 26), a cancellation mainly due, it says, to lack of interest among local clients.
Mortons Travel, of Bramley Road, ran the first of the tours - dubbed “Middleton tours,” - on February 20, including stops at places of interest such as St Andrew's church, Bradfield, where she was baptised and the Old Boot Inn, Stanford Dingley, which her parents, Carole and Michael, are said to frequent.
Other stops included Bradfield primary school, which she attended as a child, the Upper Bucklebury Spar convenience store she, her fiance, Prince William, and parents, have visited, while also passing the Bucklebury house she was brought up in and where her parents still currently live.
Mortons' spokesman, John Simpson, pointed out the first tour - part of the company's excursion programme - only cost £10 per person: “We thought, “It's the royal wedding and she's a local girl and that our normal clientele would like it,” said Mr Simpson.
The second tour, on March 12, he continued, attracted predominantly media interest for places, with an increased price of £35 per person to cover the additional fuel costs of collecting customers from London and to pay for a trained guide.
The third and final tour, he added, would take place on Saturday (March 26), with places again filled by customers from the media:
“Then that will be it,” said Mr Simpson, adding:
“There was not a lot of local interest - the first tour had only around a dozen of our regular clientele and we don't want to intrude too much locally. Folk at Bucklebury are, in effect, our neighbours, we only put a small bus through their country lanes and we said: ‘Enough is enough.'”
Mr Simpson also hit back at national media claims the coach tours offered poor value for money, with one report describing them as "A Tour de Farce," and "Less like a royal experience and more like a day trip to Slough."
Places on the coach trips, he said, had been allocated to certain members of the national media on the understanding they wished to write a light-hearted article about the experience.
"We never dreamed it would be as facetious as it was and so inaccurate," he said.
Their qualified tour guide, he continued, had written to complain about alleged inaccuracies one report contained, but Mortons decided not to pursue the matter, despite no retraction being published.
