Voice of Travel

When flying into a big city, sometimes it can be hard to figure out how to get from the airport to your hotel, and then back to the airport.

Should you take a cab? A shuttle? Should you hire a driver? Depending on the city you’re going to, there could be a huge difference in price. It makes it even more difficult if you don’t know the city at all.

Plus, once you decide to take a shuttle (since many times this is the cheapest option), how do you find one, and how much will it cost?

ShuttleFare aims to make this easy for you. Unlike many other websites out there, you can just go to their site, enter in the location of where you want to go, and you’ll get a price right away.

As you can see in the screenshot above, they make it really simple. You enter in the airport you’ll be flying in or out of (you can also use this as transportation to the airport and back to your own home), the address of the location you’ll be going to (or coming from if on the way to the airport), and how many people will be going.

Hit “Get Quote” (you don’t even have to enter your email address if you don’t want to), and seconds later you’ll get your results.

As you can see, ShuttleFare doesn’t only give you their prices, but you’ll get prices from the competition as well!

The reason that the prices are all over the place is that usually a few of them are regular shuttles, (some scheduled and some only run when you book them), and you’ll also see regular car service options such as a van, sedan, and others where you’ll be the only ones that are being transported.

Let’s take San Francisco for example. Two people can go round trip from the airport to their hotel, and then back to the airport at the end of the trip for $68. I don’t know about you, but to me that was pretty reasonable. That equates to $17 per person each way.

To give you a comparison, a one way trip from the airport to the same hotel by cab would cost about $68 (including a tip). So it would cost twice as much to travel by cab.

Of course, one negative is that the shuttle might stop at other hotels first, to drop others off.  But if you’re not in a hurry, it doesn’t make a difference.  Usually at most there are 1-3 stops before you, and most shuttle companies are good about making sure that the other stops are near yours, so you aren’t going out of your way at all.

On Friday I’ll be posting about my experience with ShuttleFare, as I used them a little less than two years ago when I went to San Francisco.

In the mean time, I hope this was helpful.  I know that whenever I go to a city, figuring out transportation is usually one of the first things I think about after the trip is booked.

Check out ShuttleFare!