In a major shakeup of the local guided tour industry, the national company Historic Tours of America is breaking into San Antonio with plans to start offering trolley bus tours in March after City Sightseeing of San Antonio, with its signature red double-decker buses, recently shut down.
Historic Tours is rebranding City Sightseeing into Old Town Trolley Tours, which will offer tours in stadium-style trolleys, said Stephen Burress, regional manager at Historic Tours, in an interview. The company bought some of the assets of City Sightseeing, which had been run by owner David Strainge, and is hiring its workforce of roughly 20 employees, he said.
City Sightseeing stopped operating on Jan. 9, Burress said. He hopes to get Old Town Trolley up and running in San Antonio by early March. City Sightseeing’s tour routes will be expanded to go as far north as the San Antonio Zoo, the Japanese Tea Garden and the Witte Museum, he said.
Last month, Historic Tours planted local roots by buying a 4.6-acre property with several warehouses, taking up nearly an entire city block at 540 Culebra Rd., near the road’s crossing with Interstate 10 northwest of downtown. The company will have its offices there as well as a maintenance barn for its orange-and-green trolleys, Burress said.
Branding itself “The Nation’s Storyteller,” Historic Tours offers bus tours in its headquarters city of Key West, Florida, as well as in Boston; Nashville; San Diego; Washington, D.C.; Savannah, Georgia; and St. Augustine, Florida, according to its website. The tours cover a range of topics, from ghosts to the Boston Tea Party to seal tours in San Diego and President Harry Truman’s “Little White House” residence in Key West.
Old Town Trolley Tours has been operating in Key West since 1976, according to Historic Tours’ website. The company traces its origin to a partnership formed in the early 1970s to restore historic buildings in that city.
In a 2017 article, the online magazine Atlas Obscura described Historic Tours’ CEO Chris Belland as being “one of the earliest and most influential adopters” of using trolley-style buses to offer sightseeing tours — a style that has spread to cities across the U.S.
“The timing could not have been more perfect,” Belland said in a press release about the company’s entry into San Antonio. “We have been looking to expand and the opportunity presented itself in this amazing city. San Antonio is a city with incredible history, attractions, sites and fabulous people, which is what we look for when going into a city. We could not have done this without the collaboration of David Strainge.”
A native of England, Strainge opened City Sightseeing of San Antonio 13 years ago as a franchise of the international tour bus operator based in Seville, Spain. He has lately branched into other ventures, owning a minority stake in the Crockett Tavern and Be Kind & Rewind bars near Alamo Plaza, which are “ticking along rather nicely,” he said in an interview.
Historic Tours is “a 50-year-old, very established family company and I have very much enjoyed dealing with them,” he said. “I was more than happy to pass the baton. When I came here 13 years ago, I like to think I upped the quality of hop-on, hop-off tours in San Antonio and I have no doubt they’re going to use their resources and experience to get it to the same level” as in the other cities where they have tours.
Strainge said he is working with local restaurateurs Sam Panchevre and Terry Corless on a restaurant with a Day of the Dead theme, which they plan to open in roughly two months on the River Walk near La Villita.
“It’s going to be an authentic Mexican restaurant and bar,” he said. “We’re looking to do something that isn’t really on the River Walk in terms of style and attractiveness.”
Strainge is planning on staying in San Antonio “certainly for the short- and medium-term,” he said.
“I’ve got too much going on now in San Antonio,” he said. “I came here to build a business and I accidentally built a life.”
