Nashville's Dreamliner Coaches brings customized luxury innovation to tour bus industry

No fewer than a dozen arena and stadium-touring Americana and country music acts are scheduled to visit Nashville in the first eight months of 2024. Expand that list to encompass Ascend Amphitheater, Brooklyn Bowl and Ryman Auditorium, and it expands to nearly three dozen.

If you're in Nashville and the industry of building and furnishing tour buses, it's a lucrative time.

The last quarter of 2023 has seen nearly one-third of the regularly touring fleet of roughly 1,000 luxury tour buses nationwide fall into the control of two companies based in the same Nashville community.

September 2023 saw Whites Creek Tennessee's Encore Luxury Coach Leasing acquire Nitetrain Coach Company to create a fleet of over 145 coaches. Two months later, Whites Creek-based Dreamliner Luxury Coaches acquired Hemphill Brothers Coach Company. The purchase tripled Dreamliner's fleet to 190 coaches.

According to Dreamliner CEO Jeremy Maul, the acquisition puts Dreamliner in an enviable position: 50 percent of 2024's larger arena and stadium tours in North America -- including Zach Bryan, Drake, Olivia Rodrigo and Chris Stapleton -- will travel with upscale coaches furnished by the company.

"Artists wanting to feel secure in newer coaches with experienced bus drivers and have smooth rides while experiencing the same amenities as five-star hotels," said Maul in a mid-December conversation with The Tennessean at Dreamliner's offices.

Unprecedented luxury accompanies Nashville artists' broadened tour schedule

This isn't an inexpensive development.

Dreamliner's rentable coaches are an open-ended cost expenditure depending upon an artist's requirements.

In regards to pricing, Stephenville, Texas' Emerald Luxury Coaches and Chicago's Liberty Coaches have partnered to offer 2010s-era refurbished Prevost luxury bus conversions. Recent pricing has noted that a 2016 Emerald model built on a 45-foot Prevost X3 chassis, featuring a Sub-Zero refrigerator, Bosch washer/dryer, 4 roof-mounted A/C systems and a state-of-the-art LED lighting system was listed for sale at $1,495,000. Typically, Prevost conversions are on sale for at least $1 million more.

Thus, it's entirely possible to confuse an elegantly appointed, modern-decorated two-bedroom and two-bathroom midtown condominium with the tour bus chart-topping and arena-touring country star Kelsea Ballerini's is renting from Dreamliner for 2023 and 2024.

Sit on a plush couch while staring at a marble countertop and Nespresso coffee machine aboard her bus in Dreamliner's Whites Creek parking lot, and you're aware it's the latter. However, the luxury amenities in the customized motor coach are most often found in the former.

That comfort level is vital as, especially in country music, 2024's tour cycle is a 12-month one.

For decades, touring cycles from March through October have been the expectation. However, acts are increasingly willing to tour in the former "off-season" at arenas in less populated or far-flung locations. To also service a growing number of acts on the road, venue bookers are pulling smaller, 20-40,000-seat stadiums into play.

"These unexpected pop acts are foremost expanding the number of buses they're leasing from [Dreamliner] and also leasing them longer," added Maul. "The Americana and country acts breaking into pop stardom are still, like tradition, playing amphitheaters, festivals and state fairs, but also regularly playing arenas and stadiums."

Why are more touring acts desiring luxury coaches?

The rise in road tours puts Nashville in a perfect spot: Music City is a 900-mile ride to 80 percent of America's population.

If an act travels to an amphitheater, arena, fair, festival or stadium sometime in 2024, they're likely leaving from Nashville.

Maul is a formerly California-based veteran of the tour bus industry with experience working alongside teams supporting Jay-Z, Lady Gaga, Kendrick Lamar and more. He emerged from COVID-19's quarantine with a plan to blend amenities and design inspirations typically found in boutique hotels and on luxury yachts with quality service -- and a big enough capital infusion to deliver two-dozen customized buses to the market by 2024.

After COVID's lockdowns ended, concert ticket buyers came back in droves, placing a higher premium than ever before on the live music experience.

Performers also wanted to engage with the touring experience, but similarly, at an elevated scope, Maul said.

He achieved this through a partnership with Rich Thomson, a fellow Californian and founder of private credit fund Caprice Capital Partners -- which focuses on lending money to founder, family, and entrepreneur-owned companies -- created Dreamliner in Jan. 2021.

Two years later, the acquisition of Kylee Ervin's Diamond Coach company completes his vision -- for now.

As country music trends towards pop, a pop-acclaimed services provider is ready and willing to offer boutique luxury to the genre's superstars at their commercial and creative pinnacle.

"We're in a sophistication-driven changing of the guard era in this industry and music in general," Maul said. "On a bus these days, if they so choose, emerging stars want high-speed internet and king-sized beds as much as they may also want the ability to record an album or opt not to use an under-sized dressing room."

Supporting and sustaining a multi-billion dollar industry

Artists' desire for luxury tour vehicles has begun to replace the expectation of a bus merely meant to transport an artist safely between shows.

This fuels an industry that has taken an unprecedented turn in the past two years.

Dreamliner, like others, is left not just welcoming the future's challenges but embracing the ability to evolve beyond the peak of the industry's expectations.

The company is booked solid for the next twelve months. The liners being built for the road are capable of lifetimes of handling upwards of five million miles of travel. That number could be met much more rapidly than ever before.

Dreamliner also anticipates spending roughly $10 million in upkeep on the buses' operation, while interiors that are luxury now are likely to be antiquated within a half-decade or less.

Alone, though, 2023 saw Luke Combs, George Strait, and Morgan Wallen play 97 shows and earn nearly a half-billion dollars in gross revenue.

Extrapolate those numbers across the dozen Americana and country headliners playing in massive arenas and stadiums in 2024.

An industry earning billions in gross revenue can undoubtedly afford to benefit its service providers who promptly offer them comfort and luxury.

When asked what those unprecedented revenues could yield for Dreamliner's future aspirations, Maul laughed and didn't hesitate to throw out a pie-in-the-sky aspiration.

"Semi-trucks and planes -- those are our next goals," he said. "Our clients who use our buses will likely want to streamline their providers even more. I've waited a decade to see our industry reach this moment and I can't wait to pull the trigger on the future."

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Nashville's tour bus business brings luxury innovation to industry