Thank you for visiting our website. We have been operating motorcoach and air tours since 1989. We have operated tours to 43 Major League Baseball stadiums. Considering there are 30 MLB teams, we have seen many new stadiums develop and open over the past 20 years. We have operated tours to 14 of the 23 current NASCAR tracks and have offered tours to many Broadway productions. We have operated trips to Buffalo Bills games every year since 1989. We have also operated many sightseeing trips to destinations such as Washington DC, Ottawa, Vermont, NYC, many National Parks, and much more.
Tim has visited 47 of 50 States and can't wait to explore Hawaii, Alaska, and Oregon. Tim has been to six countries in Europe as well. We have enjoyed seeing and exploring the USA through our tours. Last but certainly not least, thank you to all our great customers who have joined us on this journey. We can't wait to travel with you all again. Come join us!
Tour operator specializes in baseball, persistence
Frank
Bilovsky, Staff writer
March 21, 2005
The
major league baseball season opens on April 3. Bock
Tours' baseball season opens five days later.
That's when the Honeoye Falls-based tour company runs the first trip of its 17th baseball season. For $70, fans can catch a round-trip motorcoach ride to Toronto's Sky Dome, sit in a field-level seat and watch the Blue Jays play their home opener against the world champion Boston Red Sox.
If you can't make that one, Tim Bock has more than a dozen other baseball trips on this year's schedule, along with NASCAR, the Buffalo Bills, several theater and sightseeing packages, and an annual New York City Christmas tour.
He's coming off his best year in 2004 and has made giant strides since 1989, when he started the business as a part-time tour package director.
"I always wanted to have a business of my own," said the 43-year-old married father of two.
Bock was an accountant working internal auditing at the University of Rochester when he decided to make the tour business his full-time occupation in summer 1990.
As the only full-time employee, Bock says he's learned a lot since his first baseball tour to Toronto in 1989, the year Sky Dome opened.
But, he says, that doesn't mean his job has gotten any easier.
"Running your own business is always a challenge," he said. "Unless people have done it, they don't realize how difficult it is. Things are constantly changing, whether it be the Internet, e-mail, team's policies, hotel policies, weather, terrorism, the economy, airline policies."
Consider what potentially would be his most popular tour of the year — Yankees-Red Sox games at either Yankee Stadium or Fenway Park.
It won't happen.
"The Red Sox and Yankees did not sell group tickets this year," Bock said. "The only way you could get them was through season tickets or a brokerage."
Facing a prohibitive expense, Bock got around it by creatively offering packages for those two teams in series against other American League opponents at Fenway and Yankee Stadium.
Bock says the keys to success in the highly competitive tour business are "persistence, patience, perseverance — and contacts," which include ticket managers, airlines, motorcoach companies and hotel chains.
He could have added foresight to his list. In the mid-1990s, well before his peers recognized the mushrooming popularity of NASCAR, the Oswego native began organizing trips to races in Dover, Del., and Richmond, Va., that proved highly successful. This year, Bock Tours has five NASCAR trips slated, including one to Charlotte, N.C., in October.
Still, if he has a signature item, it's baseball. By the end of this summer, he will have taken Rochester-area tourists to every current major league ballpark except two — and he's planning to fill that void with a tour to Florida next spring.
Bock began organizing multi-day trips with one that included stops in Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago and Cincinnati in 1992. Since then, they have been summertime staples — except for one year.
"We had an eight- or nine-day Midwest trip scheduled in 1994 which got canceled because of the baseball strike," he said. The work stoppage cost him a chunk of that year's expected revenue, but it could have been worse.
"The teams gave us the ticket money back and the hotels gave us the deposit money back," he said. "They were all pretty understanding that it was a very unusual circumstance."
Bock's tours are often full enough that he requires multiple buses from the three or four companies that he normally uses. His largest was a six-motorcoach caravan to Toronto to see basketball superstar Michael Jordan.
Bock's lodging isn't Ritz Carlton, but it isn't low end, either. He uses several chains, including Hampton Inn.
He gets lots of repeat business and high grades from his clients, especially from families who travel with children.
Tax preparer Jon Costello of Albion started making a trip or two a year with Bock Tours more than a decade ago when his son was a teenager.
"We have gone with competitors in the past and they don't provide the extra effort that Tim and his staff do," Costello said. "The competitors do not offer you the availability of the maps of cities, places for eating, just extra things that don't cost him a lot but add to value."
Costello said one competitor pulled away instead of waiting for a late customer who had arrived. Bock Tours once sent out someone to find an elderly customer who had gotten lost on the way to one of the pickup points he was at, he said.
Dick Murney, a longtime Bock customer, has scheduled four trips this year with his wife, Lydia, including a 10-day western swing that will include five national parks and three ball games.
"The trips are well planned, all the details are covered and you see a lot without a lot of wasted time when you go on one of those extended trips," Murney said, adding:
"(Bock) uses quality carriers and well-located hotels. And it seems like a family atmosphere. You're treated like family and after you go on two or three of those trips, you know a lot of the people who are going."
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