Big Bus traces to a three-bus London operation the Maybury family started in 1991, and its NYC service now runs open-top double-deckers on two loop routes.
The uptown and downtown loops run on different frequencies and stop earlier in the afternoon than many visitors expect, so check the last-departure times at your stop before hopping off.
Big Bus is the product of a 2011 merger between Les Cars Rouges, founded in Paris in 1990, and The Big Bus Company, which the Maybury family started in London in June 1991 with three vehicles. The group now runs several hundred open-top double-deckers across more than two dozen cities, with Exponent Private Equity holding the majority stake and Merlin Entertainments a minority one. In New York the service is two Manhattan loops, a longer downtown circuit and a shorter uptown one, running on separate frequencies and sharing a string of stops between Midtown and the Battery.
The downtown loop is the more useful of the two. It threads the Flatiron district, Chelsea, Greenwich Village, SoHo and Chinatown down to the Financial District and Battery Park, which is a lot of ground to cover on foot in a day and awkward to stitch together by subway if you do not already know the lines. The uptown loop runs along Central Park and the Upper East Side, past the Metropolitan Museum, before turning back through Midtown near Grand Central.
Two practical things catch people out. Those published loop durations assume traffic that Midtown does not reliably provide, so plan for longer than the timetable suggests. And the last buses leave the stops well before evening, earlier than most visitors expect, which is how people end up walking back from the bottom of the island. Check the final departure at your stop before you get off.
What the ticket really buys is orientation on a first day: a moving map of how the neighborhoods sit against one another, seen from above the parked cars. Once you have the subway worked out, it is faster and reaches further. The top deck is where the value is, so save it for a dry day, and be honest that a wet ride downstairs is just a bus in traffic.
Times Square, New York, NY 10036 · Official site ↗
Big Bus Tours, is an operator of open top bus sightseeing tours formed in May 2011 after "Les Cars Rouges" and the "Big Bus Company" merged. The company operates in 28 cities of 18 countries with 444 buses operating around the world. Most of the cities it serves are in the United States. Typically, Big Bus Tours use open top double-decker buses in burgundy and cream-coloured livery.
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