Alan Bonson is not alone – although running his coach business in a sector coping with ever-increasing regulation, changing social habits and competition from budget airlines, he may sometimes feel lonely.

JAK Travel, based at Sandbeds, near Keighley, is part of the small business sector which employs 14.4 million people – amounting to 47 per cent of private-sector employment – and last year had a combined turnover of £1,600 billion, according to the Federation of Small Businesses.

The company, which started with one eight-year-old coach in 1987, recently took delivery of a new £230,000 Plaxton Panther luxury vehicle from one of the last British coachbuilders, taking the fleet to five – the average size for a UK coach operator.

Alan is proud that, since 2005, he has been able to upgrade JAK’s fleet of coaches with new vehicles after many years of running secondhand ones.

Launching the business with his wife Kath (the couple are now separated) enabled him to achieve a boyhood ambition of driving coaches – something he does much less of these days as he focuses on administration.

Alan grew up in Altrincham,Cheshire, where his family owned a furniture store, and watched the locally-based fleet of Jackson (later Shearings) coaches passing by.

“From early on I wanted to work in coach travel rather than in the furniture trade, which was too slow for my taste,” Alan said.

His ambitions were frustrated at first. After graduating from Aston University in transport planning and operation and business administration, Alan became a trainee manager with the distribution side of the Beechams pharmaceutical group, which also handled logistics for other brands.

After relocating back from London to Leeds he was offered a redundancy package – and his wife was also offered severance from her job at a Bradford marketing agency.

The couple took off on a round-the-world trip.

“When we got back I was 27 and Kath 25 and were young and daft enough to have a go at launching a business. We were greener than the grass in the fields.

“We rented an office in Kirkgate, Bradford, even before we had a coach, and once we had one I did all the driving. We must have done all right as we acquired a second coach at the end of the first season,” Alan said.

They managed to turn an early crisis around after the last-minute cancellation of a trip to the Edinburgh Tattoo.

Alan recalled: “It left us in the lurch with all the hotel rooms booked and tickets for the Tattoo. Being green we hadn’t taken any deposits, so were facing a major problem. We put an A-board outside the office and advertised in the T&A and sold out the trip. The Tattoo remains a regular fixture in our itinerary today.”

Over the years, JAK has operated a mixture of holiday tours, excursions and school trips.

But social change and financial constraints, together with the cost of meeting tougher regulation, have increased the challenges – although JAK has managed to remain profitable, even through the recession, and maintained turnover at around £700,000.

“Running a business brings rewards and satisfaction but also a lot of worries and responsibility. It’s definitely not a get-rich-quick industry and the buck starts and stops with me. There have been times during the recession when money was very tight and you look over into the abyss. You know the well can run dry and that’s a horrible feeling,” said Alan.

A key challenge to JAK’s tours trade has been the rise of the budget airlines which enable people to jet off cheaply to exotic destinations.

JAK’s programme still includes one eight-day foreign tour. This year it also includes a four-day First World War centenary commemoration trip taking in the Passchendaele Memorial Museum and the Menin Gate to hear the nightly playing of The Last Post, along with a visit to Tyne Cot war cemetery. In contrast, the programme also includes the Carpet of Flowers event held every two years in Brussels.

Alan said: “We’ve done military commemoration tours before, including the Second World War Normandy and Dunkirk beaches. On one trip a passenger wanted to visit a war cemetery to find the graves of his commanding officers. We searched around until we found them and it was very emotional. They weren’t just names on a headstone.”

Rising car ownership in the 1960s was the first major threat to coach travel, but JAK has seen rising demand among its core 55-plus customer base among car owners who no longer want to drive long distances to resorts such as Torquay.

This year, Alan has seen signs that the school trip business is reviving after dipping last year due to tighter school budgets. JAK also still provides coaches for the regular school run as a sub-contractor.

But one area of business that has declined is hiring coaches for group trips as the number of sports and social clubs, retirement groups and church societies has declined.

Although buying the new coach is a sign of faith in the future, Alan has no plans to expand JAK beyond its current size. The company employs three full-time and four part-time drivers and three office staff.

“It’s manageable and if we keep the coaches busy can make as much money as running 20-odd without the hassle of extra staffing and maintenance. The fleet is big enough to cope with multiple coach jobs except the really big stuff. I’ve always believed in only taking on what we can deliver and focusing on providing a high standard of service in well-maintained coaches,” he said.

He is quietly satisfied with his achievements – but is not recommending that his children go into the business. It is likely Alan, 54, will wind down JAK when he retires rather than hand it on.

In the meantime, he heads an enterprise that owns its own base – JAK moved to the former petrol station site at Sandbeds 12 years ago – and, apart from finance for the new coach, is debt-free.

“When all the vehicles are in it’s great to realise that we can now buy new coaches. It’s taken more than 20 years but that has been a real achievement,” said Alan.