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.
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