This Crazy Triple-Decker Bus Is A 6×6 Off-Roader And A Hotel For 20 People In One

Today, many adventurers like heading out into remote areas behind the wheel of something like a Land Rover, Jeep, or Land Cruiser, but what if you want to take more than just a few people on a trip? One German company has a funny solution. This tour company takes up to 34 people on overlanding tours and does so with one of the craziest vehicles: a titanic off-road 6×6 bus with a triple-deck section that functions as a mobile hotel.

The bus is one of history’s greatest vehicular inventions, but it probably isn’t your first choice for an expedition through rugged terrain. Several inventors and companies have considered this, and history is full of truly bonkers buses built to get a lot of people through harsh places all at once. In the past, I’ve covered the giant ice-crawling Foremost Terra Buses and the extreme-duty buses of Torsus, both of which have gone places that no regular bus can reach.

Rotel Tours adds a whole extra layer of craziness to the concept of a rugged bus. These things look like something a bad AI would produce. At first, when our secret designer, The Bishop, gave me pictures of this thing, I thought he was joking around with AI. But these buses are very real, and they serve a really specific niche.

Rotel Tours has preserved a ridiculous amount of documentation about its history, and thanks to that, we have the full story of how some seemingly random company in Germany runs some of the weirdest buses.

From Tents To Triple-Decker Trailers

According to Rotel, in 1945, a 17-year-old Georg Höltl conceived the idea for a bus company that provided point-to-point trips. Only a few months after the end of World War II, Höltl bought an old 1936 Praga RND bus. The wood gas-converted bus proved to be unreliable, and a normal bus line turned out to be unprofitable.

Rotel says that Höltl didn’t want to give up on buses, but decided to take things in a different direction. Instead of being a typical bus line, he’d focus on tourism and travel. But Höltl couldn’t just do that while rocking a bus from the 1930s. Höltl’s business reboot would be powered by a new 1950 Mercedes-Benz O 3500 bus with a Frankfurt bus body. Based on the L 3500 diesel truck, this was Mercedes-Benz’s first postwar bus design and featured a relatively low floor for easy embarkment.

This bus turned out to be perfect for Höltl. Passengers had headrests and places to store their hand luggage. Also, the bus featured a built-in intercom system for the tour guide to communicate with passengers. In 1951, Rotel says Germany reopened international travel again, which allowed Höltl to take his bus on its first international trip to Switzerland that August.

Höltl’s business sort of took off from there, and his bus made several dozen excursions around Germany, Switzerland, and then Rome. Then came another expansion of Höltl’s idea: the rolling hotel. As Rotel explains:

It was a groundbreaking idea at a time when camping was still relatively unpopular. People used the few campsites that existed, and camped wild in between. The Spanish coast was still completely undeveloped, the coastal road was narrow and winding, and there was hardly any traffic. Most of Georg Höltl’s trips were subsequently made in tents, until the invention of the rolling hotel in 1959.

Previously, in September 1951, Georg Höltl and three friends from Passau had explored the route. Georg Höltl had mapped out a route. One of the friends had a car, which made it possible to complete the exploration. They spent the night in tents.

At first, Höltl’s rolling hotel involved driving tourists around in his bus. When it was time to stop for the day, people would largely sleep in tents. Only one or a couple of lucky people would get to sleep in a kitchen trailer towed behind the bus.

As Rotel notes, the tents did their job, but they didn’t always make for a particularly comfortable journey. On some of the company’s trips, especially those in the Mediterranean during spring or fall, tourists would have to deal with heavy downpours. These people, who were expecting to have a fun holiday away from home, now had to deal with washed-out tents and ruined luggage.

This made company personnel think about that kitchen trailer, which provided warm and dry accommodations to the person lucky enough to sleep in it. What if the kitchen trailer could be made large enough to sleep everyone? Höltl loved the idea and drew up a design for what the trailer would look like. In the winter of 1958, the first trailer was built with help from the Nikolaus Hecka company.

Essentially a mini hotel on wheels, each window represented a bedroom with curtains and a comfy bed for two. How it normally worked was that, when the bus was on the move, you’d sit in the bus and get the touring experience. Then, when it was time to set up camp, you had dinner and retired to your room in the trailer.

Then, Höltl gave his passengers an option. They could sleep in the trailer or continue going old-school with tents. Everyone chose the trailer. The rolling hotel became so beloved that Höltl had to build a second one in 1959 to meet demand. He also realized that giving his passengers real accommodations meant his buses could now safely transport people outside of Europe. So, his buses hit the road, going to far-flung places like India and Israel.

Taking The Trailer Overland

The bus tours got pretty extreme, too. In 1962, Höltl hosted an 81-day, 22,369-mile bus tour from Germany to India and back. Rotel says that the bus started in Munich, then drove through Turkey, Persia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and ultimately into India. Then, the bus would drive through Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon), Iraq, Syria, and eventually return to Germany. At the time, Rotel claims it was the longest bus journey in the world.

Anyway, Rotel says that its name, shorthand for “The Rolling Hotel,” was officially adopted in 1964. By then, the company says the bus and its triple-decker trailer had become famous across Germany, with newspapers writing about it and even more citizens wanting to take a ride.

Triple-Decker Hotel Buses

By 1966, Rotel states that its brand had grown large enough to expand its operations to the United States and Canada. However, the steed for the North American trips wouldn’t be the separate bus and trailer. Here is where the company introduced a new concept: a single, triple-decker tour bus with a built-in hotel. The first ones were from Auwärter, a brand under German coachbuilder Neoplan. These buses carried German tourists all around the United States and Canada.

Come 1969, Rotel says it started taking its buses into harsher terrain, including crossing the Sahara. Of course, Rotel’s vintage Mercedes bus wasn’t built to handle this, so Rotel added a Unimog. If the Benz bus got stuck, which Rotel says it often did, the bus would be shoveled out, and then the Unimog would pull it out of whatever it got stuck in. That sounds like a royal pain, but Rotel claims that the 43 tourists aboard loved to see the desert action unfold. Sometimes, the passengers even helped the Unimog rescue the bus and trailer.

Just a year later, Rotel says it largely fixed the problems experienced in the Sahara with a new bus, one built for off-roading and, like the bus that toured North America, had a three-deck hotel built inside. That bus was taken on tours throughout Australia. Rotel also introduced a purely roadgoing version, which was used to tour cityscapes and other places where the bus stayed on paved roads.

Rotel’s Current Weird Buses

Many of Rotel’s operations today aren’t all that different from how they used to be. The company says it currently runs four different types of buses:

• 20-seater all-wheel drive bus combined: Ideal for expedition trips off the beaten track in South America, Africa and Asia.
• 24-seater combined bus: Used for travel in Europe.
• 34-seater all-wheel drive bus with ROTEL trailer: Perfect for large expedition trips in South America and southern Africa.
• 36-seater bus with ROTEL trailer: Our classic, proven for versatile and unforgettable trips.

The 20-seater models are the most rugged of the bunch and are typically built on Mercedes-Benz Actros trucks. The one pictured here is an Actros 3351 from the 2000s. The model that Rotel has pictured features a 6×6 system and a 15.9-liter OM 502 LA V8 diesel that produces 510 HP.

Pictured below is one of Rotel’s Combi models, which means it has the bizarre triple-decker hotel grafted onto the back of the tour bus. Judging from the photos posted to Rotel’s social media, these buses really do go off the beaten path and into places you’d normally see smaller off-road vehicles.

The 24-seater Combi bus is a road-going model, and look, you just have to see this thing. At least one of these buses, the one pictured, anyway, is a Van Hool Acron T916. It’s hard to say what’s under the panels of this rig, as Van Hool sold these buses with a selection of DAF and MAN diesel engines reaching outputs of around 530 HP.

Van Hool might be a brand you’re familiar with. If you’ve ridden a Megabus in recent times, there’s a pretty good chance you’ve ridden in a Van Hool! A Van Hool, like Rotel’s Acron, can measure around 43 feet and seat over 50 passengers. Of course, in this case, it seats only 24 because of the hotel on the back.

Rotel’s 34-seat behemoth is another off-road bus, and this one is an Actros 3350 with a V8 diesel and six-wheel drive. This bus tows a Rotel trailer and makes for some pretty awesome photography:

The final bus is what Rotel says is its classic configuration. It’s a 36-seat roadgoing bus that doesn’t have a hotel built in, but does tow a Rotel trailer. One of these buses is a Setra S 411 HD. This awesome bus comes equipped with an 11.9-liter Mercedes-Benz OM 501 LA V6 diesel, good for 407 HP. The bus measures 33 feet long, and feeds from a 108-gallon fuel tank.

The Hotel Part

These two final buses tow the more classic version of the Rotel, which rides on a custom trailer with two axles and a steering bogie. Rotel says that each of its trailers, which are the same inside as the Combi models, features two more beds than the seating capacity of the buses. The extra bed is where the driver sleeps.

According to Rotel, the Combi section or trailer is locked and inaccessible during the day. But once the bus gets to its campsite, the rooms open up. From there, Rotel says this is what you have to look forward to:

Equipment: Comfortable mattresses, duvet, pillows, outward-opening window for ventilation, one cabin curtain at the head and foot end, luggage net, cabin lighting

Single and double cabins: Most cabins are single. There are movable partitions in several places. Removing a partition between two single cabins creates a double cabin. Conversely, a double cabin can be divided into two single cabins using a partition. This allows the cabins to be adapted to the group structure. The Rotel cabins are arranged on three levels, one above the other.

Mosquito protection: A special mosquito net can be attached to the cabins. This is primarily used for travel to malaria-prone areas, such as East Africa. All cabins worldwide have a standardized attachment system. There are two different mosquito nets: one for single cabins and one for double cabins.

The company says that most of the time, the bus will park either at a well-prepared campsite or in a remote area without infrastructure. However, certain trips aren’t compatible with the hotel buses, so you’ll sleep in normal hotels or private residences. The company also notes that the buses have built-in camp kitchens and everyone gets free cutlery.

As for the trips, Rotel says that, depending on the trip you choose, the bus might stay in a single region for a few days, or it might cross an entire continent. It depends on how wild you want to go. For example, for $5,737, Rotel has an all-inclusive trip where the company flies you in from Germany, drives you across America for 25 days, and then flies you back home.

To be clear, this post isn’t sponsored in any way. I just saw some cool buses and wanted to write about them!

Sadly, the company admits that its buses and Rotel trailers are not wheelchair accessible and can be difficult to ride for people with limited mobility. That part sucks. Of course, you’re also sort of on your own for protecting yourself from whatever dangers might be present in the area around the bus when it parks.

But, really, the things that get me all excited here are the buses. It makes me laugh that the entire concept of this business is built on a guy deciding to make a triple-decker camping hotel trailer thing as an alternative to tents. It’s the kind of silly that is right up my alley. It looks like something made with AI, yet it’s a real thing.

We do have a lot of European friends here, so I have to ask: Have any of you taken a ride in one of these? If so, how was it? I’d love to read a comment about these weird buses.

Top image: Rotel Tours