Profile: Bellair Charters & Airporter Shuttle
Busy-ness with buses Bellair Charters/Airporter Shuttle moving up to 150,000 passengers a year
Bellair Charters & Airporter senior staff members: (front left) Adrienne Booth, director of sales and marketing; (front right) Rob Takemura, operations manager; (back left) Richard Johnson, owner and president, and (back right) Jody Hernandez, maintenance manager.
Interview and photos by Mike McKenzie
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irporter Shuttle bills itself on the Web as “the car-free, care-free ride to and from Sea-Tac Airport and downtown Seattle.” Even when a bridge on I-5 in the heart of Skagit County collapsed in May, putting a crimp in the “care-free” part of anyone traveling that route until it was fixed, Airporter Shuttle responded quickly and efficiently. The staff immediately went into crisis-management mode during its round-the-clock operations. The dispatchers stayed on top of monitoring traffic patterns and road conditions minute-by-minute, 20 | BUSINESSPULSE.COM
mapping out alternate routes, and posting updated information on the website hourly. This is typical of the customer service that has made Airporter Shuttle and Bellair Charters a reliable source for travelers to rely on for almost three decades. Its ridership, according to owner/president Richard Johnson, recently surpassed 3 million. And that’s just with the shuttles only, not counting the chartered trips. As the fleet has grown to 32 vehicles—20 motor coaches, 10 mini-buses, and two vans—and the work force to 78 (see Top Private Companies), the company delivers from the most remote spots in the county to a variety of destinations throughout the state.
“We’re carrying between 140,000-150,000 passengers a year now,” Johnson said. With that responsibility and load, he said, the highest priority is safety. On a tour of the facilities he proudly displayed the multi-layered safety checks that each vehicle undergoes in a fully-staffed, fullytooled garage after each run. Jody Hernandez heads up that operation. The business started under a father-son buy-out in 1985. E.M. Wickkiser, known as “Red,” and his son Larry alternately took the wheel of a 10-passenger van to drive travelers between Bellingham and Seattle-Tacoma (SeaTac) Airport twice a day. Today, the combined companies that officially appear on the logo