Passes & Canyons Blog

I was talking before about ScooTours Denver and David Howard, who just set up this business and is getting it rolling. (Yes, that pun was intended.)

As I said before, making a living renting scooters can be a hard thing to do, and it is not David’s regular job. That other one pays the bills but this one is more fun. He talked about how often someone will work a job for years that they don’t really like, and then retire and take up an interest, which then becomes a business where they make as much or more than they did on that other job all those years, and this one is so much more fun. David decided not to wait that long, but to cut right to it now. Who knows if he’ll be successful; right now business is “inadequate.” But he’s only been at it a very brief time, and meanwhile he does have business.

In addition to the simple matter of renting scooters, it is David’s intention to offer guided scooter tours of Denver, primarily historical tours. One that he has in mind is “Cold Facts on Colfax” tour, starting out west around Kipling and working east perhaps to Monaco. The guide would pull the group over periodically to talk about the history of the area they were in.

I asked if the plan was to have everyone connected by an intercom system but David said no, he had thought about that, but it just didn’t seem a good idea to offer that sort of distraction to a lot of people who were not experienced riders. Those folks need to be paying attention to where they’re going and to traffic around them, not turning their heads to look at some building as they ride past it. I had to agree. Strongly.

Another tour idea would be an arts district tour. He has people lined up who would be good guides for these tours. It’s just a matter of getting the business running so that he could be confident that there would be people actually signing up for the tours. At what point do you turn the switch, he’s wondering.

Actually, here’s an interesting thing. I just got an email from David while writing this and he tells me, “It is actually my wife’s business, truth be told. She has been a substitute teacher up through last week and is just turning her attention to this beginning tomorrow. I have helped get it up and running.”

Well, whoever’s running the show, I wish them well. We’ve just been recently on vacation where renting scooters to tourists is big business, so why shouldn’t it be a viable business in Denver. Lord knows we get plenty of tourists coming through here. And the rate is a heck of a lot cheaper than renting a motorcycle. Motorcycle rental can easily set you back more than $200 a day. At ScooTours the rate is $65 for the first two hours, $85 for the first three, or a daily maximum of $95. And I know in the places we were recently I would far rather have had a scooter than a motorcycle.

I’m rooting for you guys.

Recent from National Motorcycle Examiner
Ride report: Spending time on a Vectrix VX-2

Biker Quote for Today

I never fail…sometimes I succeed in finding out what doesn’t work.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 13th, 2013 at 1:01 pm and is filed under Biker Issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.