On any given day at LAX, vans from as many as 40 shuttle services might be waiting to pick up customers. Rather, they fear the small operators that increasingly encroach on what they consider to be their territory. Meanwhile, Kindt and Goss said their biggest complaint isn’t with each other. Also, the company is starting a marketing program with United Airlines in April. Prime Time recently began courting companies that have employee ride-share programs and plans to expand service soon to the Ontario airport and, eventually, San Francisco International. Kindt said he’s also looking for other sources of revenues. Now that the war is over, travel is picking up again, and Prime Time will start to benefit from efficiencies such as its own carwash and a new computer system for tracking rides, he said. It’s tough to make a buck in the airport shuttle business because the industry “is in such an upheaval,” Goss said.īut Kindt said he’s convinced that the merger will pay off in the long run. Goss recently cut back the number of vans in operation to 150 from 192. The Los Angeles-based company grossed about $48 million last year but only broke even, said John Goss, SuperShuttle’s president. The eight-year-old SuperShuttle carries about 400,000 customers a month nationwide, including 120,000 in the Los Angeles area. Indeed, SuperShuttle, the area’s largest shuttle service and several times the size of Prime Time, is just squeaking by. They now have more equipment, but it didn’t solve anything,” he said. “Each one had equipment and wanted to make themselves bigger. Prime Time’s 100 red vans ferry customers from Castaic on the north and San Clemente on the south-and from the ocean to Ontario on the east-to LAX and the Burbank, Long Beach and John Wayne airports.Įrnie Gallipo, president of Los Angeles-based Transportation Consultants of America, called the Prime Time merger “dumb.” Size, he said, won’t necessarily lead to profits in the shuttle business. Prime Time has about 350 employees, including Kindt’s sister and his attorney wife, Anne, who quit her law practice to help the company through its hard times. Kindt owns 70% of the new Prime Time and Ramsey, vice president and chief financial officer, owns 30%. Kindt and Ramsey both started their companies in 1986, and last year the combined firms took in $9.5 million in revenues and averaged more than 50,000 rides a month. A trip from Sherman Oaks to LAX on Prime Time Shuttle, for instance, runs about $20.ĭozens of shuttle services have surfaced in Southern California in the decade since the PUC decision.
Shuttle companies use vans to drive several passengers at a time to and from airports and charge about half the price of a taxi ride. The airport shuttle business came out of a 1981 state Public Utilities Commission decision that deregulated a market dominated by cabs and buses. And although air travel has begun to pick up again, the new Prime Time faces a tough time ahead because competition from large and small shuttle companies is intense. Prime Time went through about a year of unspecified losses before the merger, Kindt said, because of the costs of expanding the company quickly. “The truth is we’ve had a hard time in this merger,” he said.Įven before the merger, things weren’t easy. Meanwhile, small competitors have continued to crop up in the loosely regulated business, taking customers away from industry leaders such as Prime Time and SuperShuttle, the Avis and Hertz of airport shuttles.Īfter laying off about 20 workers, closing a satellite office in Orange County and realizing a substantial loss in February, Kindt, Prime Time’s president, is serious. When the Persian Gulf War started, the travel industry came to a standstill and Prime Time’s business fell by 50%. The merger of Prime Time Shuttle and City Shuttle, both formerly based in Van Nuys, into a new Sun Valley-based company, also called Prime Time Shuttle, came just as the economy was sliding into recession and people were putting off travel plans. The young shuttle industry was growing rapidly and by combining the two operations into Southern California’s second-largest airport shuttle company, they could quickly get a jump on a bigger market share while benefiting from economies of scale.īut things haven’t quite gone according to plan. John Kindt and Rod Ramsey decided to merge their airport shuttle businesses last November.
0 kommentar(er)
