Saturday Interview: From one bus to 100, now Rabbie’s is to burn trail around world

He first hit the road hitching lifts, was later given a hand-up by Margaret Thatcher's enterprise allowance scheme and after steady growth a turnover of £20 million is on the horizon.

However, Mr Worsnop, founder of Rabbie’s Trail Burners, who helped formulate the North Coast 500 - the Highland tourist route that fast overtook expectations to become a visitor hit as "Scotland's Route 66" - has concerns closer to his Edinburgh base where the country's first direct tourist tax is on the table.

Mr Worsnop has warned Edinburgh City Council, which is pushing for the transient visitor levy, and the Scottish Government - which is also considering the plan - that such a charge could "kill the golden goose".

Read more: My favourite places are destinations with diverse culture and history

As he reflected on his quarter-century journey, Mr Worsnop, 51, said the effects of taxation are a worry to firms across the sector, particularly at at time of economic change under Brexit.

He said: "I did a history degree at University of Edinburgh and left there with a long list of things I didn’t want to do in the corporate world."

Mr Worsnop, pictured above outside his Edinburgh HQ (Image by Gordon Terris), went on: "I bought an old Citreon Visa with a 650cc engine in it that was more suitable for a lawnmower, stuck a tent in the back and went around the Highlands rough camping and working out routes and tour ideas and concepts, built a business plan, and did a transport management exam, so I could get a licence to operate a bus.

"The first trip was a day whisky tour, and I had three Italians on it, and then the next day I had nine people from lots of different countries going to Loch Lomond and the Trossachs.

"So that was the very beginning of it all."

A bumpy start brought whiplash when the bus was hit by an Army truck and the Citreon was separately totalled while parked outside the cricket club, but the first two staff were employed two years later, followed by the opening of a base on the Royal Mile.

Read more: Cycle paths plan to bust Highland tourist route jams

Mr Worsnop, who is also chairman of the Edinburgh Tourism Action Group, added: "I would say that I took 15 years to do the apprenticeship of working at your own business before we really started to motor in and be much more successful.

"I made a few mistakes along the way which taught me a lot about the value of the brand of Rabbie’s and what it stood for.

"We did try to operate bigger groups which the customers didn’t like and the staff didn’t like and we tried that for about a year and half before we stopped.

"We thought it would make us more money. In fact it made us less and the customers didn’t like it so we went back to the core of the business which was small group tours."

He says: "The concept of the tours was to get people off the track in places that the big coaches couldn’t go and the places that you would go in your own car and hopefully with stories and history adding to the visitor experience.

"We ask our customers what kind of accommodation they want us to book, and some of them stay in hotels, others stay in B&Bs and guest houses on different budgets and they pay for that direct to the supplier, so the money stays in the community that we visit and they can engage with local people when they are travelling with us."

Read more: My favourite places are destinations with diverse culture and history

A sojourn to Catalonia provided limited success and Rabbie's disinvested in the partnership with a Barcelona operator.

The firm set up in Glasgow, Dublin, London - touring England and Wales - then Inverness, with plans to operate tours from Aberdeen and also Manchester next year.

"We are starting off with three-day tours to North Wales and Snowdonia and three-day tours over to the Peak District, Yorkshire Dales and a three-day tour to the Lake District."

The North Coast 500 has come under a critical spotlight as destinations such as Skye appear to struggle under visitor volumes during peak season.

Read more: Tourist tax will put Edinburgh hotels at disadvantage, hospitality body says

Mr Worsnop said: "The impact it had was quite extraordinary. I don’t think any of us would have expected this as it has been in terms so simple an idea that has just had enormous traction.

"Sometimes you have pressures and you need to start managing these pressures."

He said: "It linked everything together, because one of the challenges of the North Highlands is that it was essentially largely seen as a gateway to the islands and so people were just travelling through, and that helped to make it a destination in its own right.

"As much as tourism can bring some challenges we should never forget how beneficial it is to communities, it keeps people in jobs and brings wealth to areas.

"If you knew before how successful it was going to be then perhaps you would have prepared with a bit more infrastructure but this is a chicken and egg thing and infrastructure is just a difficult thing to secure funding for and priorities of government are wide-ranging.

"I would describe them as very nice problems perhaps.

"The opposite is that we haven’t got any business and there is no wealth.

"Managing some of these impacts is a thing we have to work through but we have to do it logically and we have to use data to do it.

"When it comes to things like tourism levies my concern is that you kill the golden goose.

"You divert the wealth away from the sector that is generating wealth, generating jobs to the public purse and you displace the spend of the visitor elsewhere and for me the issue is that nobody has done a proper economic impact study around this."

Read more: My favourite places are destinations with diverse culture and history

He says: "One of the issues is pressures around how tax and spend is distributed between different government organisations.

"One should never forget that the visitors are paying while they are on holiday.

"For me it is about getting this balance right so that we don’t kill the golden goose."

Brexit fills Mr Worsnop "with a lot of trepidation, the whole thing and the whole atmosphere".

Long haul is holding up but there us a "softening of bookings from Europe".

"It is very hard to plan, not knowing what is going to be the regulatory order essentially that we are going to be under in the next four months.

"Whatever happens I’m an entrepreneur so we will work something out and take advantage of whatever comes out, but it is a difficult time."

The longer term forecast is one of further growth.

Turnover was £16m across the group this year - this is against £12.5m like for like the year before - with the target £20m next year.

The firm is more than 10 times the size it was a decade ago when turnover totalled £1.2m.

The fleet has 80 in the UK and a contractor in Ireland has 10.

"We are going up to 90-plus next year so across the UK and Ireland there will be over 100 and manpower about 250 on the payroll."

Rabbie's, named after Scotland's well-travelled bard, announced a deal with Chinese online travel agent CTrip worth £20m earlier this year.

Read more: North Coast 500’s popularity threatens to drive locals out of property market

CTrip, which bought Skyscanner, the successful travel fare aggregator also based in Edinburgh in 2016, will sell a range of Rabbie's products.

The current top-seller, the Skye tour, beat a Greek island odyssey to win a Tripadvisor short tour award and its jaunt to the Cotswolds from London was number five.

Married father-of-two Mr Worsnop said: "The plan is to roll out more products across the UK and Ireland and then potentially rolling out at different locations around the world in the future."

However, he adds that "bringing people from all over the world and cultural backgrounds together, breaking down barriers between them, and, hopefully, in a small way contributing to world peace, that’s the vision for Rabbie's for the future".