05 Sep 2025 by Jonathan Raper
Hotel Hoppa is a local bus network with services that connect Heathrow Airport terminals with local hotels in Greater London and neighbouring Berkshire. It is, however, not part of the London bus network run by Transport for London, but an independent service under the Hallmark brand, owned by Rotala Group and registered using a London Service Permit. The Hotel Hoppa services are also unusual because most of their calls are not at public bus stops, but instead at hotel forecourts. This unusual operating position has led to the Hotel Hoppa services being omitted from the national data sets that are used by apps and journey planners, to the detriment of passengers, who have to rely on posters at the terminals.
As TransportAPI provide all of the public transport information to Heathrow, we were asked if we could broker a solution to this problem, which involved several different parties. The first problem was that the hotel forecourt stopping places were not in the national bus stop database (NaPTAN). This task is technically the responsibility of Transport for London, but these are not their services and it is necessary to do a site survey to gather the information needed for NaPTAN. To make it as easy as possible for TfL to add the stopping places to NaPTAN we identified them, prepared a report identifying the services stopping at each location and supplied this to TfL.
The second problem was that the Hotel Hoppa schedules supplied to the Bus Open Data Service (BODS) used stops that no longer existed (post Covid there has been significant change at Heathrow). We identified the stops and the currently used alternatives at the terminals to ensure that the schedules matched the ground truth. The final problem was to ensure that the stops, routes and schedules appeared in journey planners and apps, most of which are powered by the Traveline National Data Set (TNDS). Once the stops were validated by a Transport for London site survey using our recommendations, TfL were able to add the Hotel Hoppa services to TNDS and the data has flowed through the national data sets and into TransportAPI managed services. We have now been delighted to see the Hotel Hoppa services in the Heathrow journey planner and TfL apps and services.
The challenges that this problem posed required partnership working across operator, local authority, airport site owner and TransportAPI as the data aggregator. It was a circular problem and TransportAPI’s role was to break into the circle and deliver actionable information to the key players. Many major sites such as airports, construction sites and shopping centres continue to have this problem with stale data infrastructure. Once the data infrastructure is in place with regular updating service providers can build rich apps and journey planners on TransportAPI managed services. Trust in the data is the foundation of behaviour change by passengers, and TransportAPI have great experience in the partnership working required to deliver and maintain the trusted data.
