There are two ways to think about getting to the airport, and most travelers pick one without much deliberation. Either you want the cheapest seat that gets you there, or you want a vehicle to yourself. The assumption underneath that choice is that companies specialize: shuttle companies do shared rides, car services do private ones, and you go to whichever matches your budget.
Booking data suggests travelers behave differently than that assumption predicts.
GO Airport Shuttle, which has provided airport ground transportation since 2007 and now serves more than 85 airports worldwide, reviewed a sample of more than 50,000 reservations booked between January 1 – June 30, 2026. The split:
- Private sedans and SUVs, including economy service: 61%
- Private vans: 18%
- Shared rides: 20%
Roughly four out of five bookings were for a private vehicle, at a company whose name contains the word “shuttle.”
One caveat before reading too much into that. Shared ride service is not available on every route or in every market, while private service is offered far more broadly. Some of that 80% reflects availability rather than pure preference. The honest reading is not that travelers overwhelmingly prefer private vehicles, but that travelers booking through a company they associate with shared shuttles are, in practice, buying private rides most of the time.
When does a shared ride make sense?
More often than its reputation suggests.
If you are traveling alone or as a couple with standard luggage, and your schedule has some slack in it, a shared ride is the cheapest door-to-door option available. It is almost always less expensive than a private car, and frequently competitive with public transit once you account for getting yourself and your bags from a station to where you are actually staying.
The tradeoff is time. A shared ride makes other stops. Heading to the airport, that usually means an earlier pickup than a private car would require. Coming from the airport, it can mean waiting for other passengers to reach the vehicle and then riding through several drop-offs before your own.
Shared works well for flexible solo travelers, budget-conscious trips, and routes where the alternative is an expensive taxi. It works poorly when you are arriving at midnight, traveling with small children, carrying oversized luggage, or connecting to a cruise departure with a hard cutoff.
When is private worth the difference?
Private service costs more per trip, but the comparison changes with group size. A private van carrying six people is often cheaper in total than six shared seats. That is a large part of why private vans account for 18% of bookings on their own.
Private also removes the variable that makes airport ground transportation stressful, which is other people’s schedules. Your vehicle goes from your door to your terminal with nothing in between.
The travelers who consistently choose private fall into recognizable groups: families with car seats and checked bags, business travelers on tight connections, groups arriving together, anyone landing late at night, and travelers heading to a cruise port where missing the ship is not a recoverable mistake.
Booking one city at a time, or the whole trip at once
Here is the decision most travelers never consciously make: whether to arrange each ride separately in each city, or book the whole trip in one place.
Arranging locally means finding a provider in your home city, then finding another one at your destination, in a city you may not know, and hoping the second one is as reliable as the first. Every leg is a separate transaction, a separate confirmation, and a separate phone number if something goes wrong.
The alternative is booking both ends at once. National networks like GO Airport Shuttle work through independent local transportation companies in each market, so the driver who meets you is local and knows the terminal, the traffic, and the pickup rules at that airport. In most markets there is more than one such operator. What the national company provides is everything around the ride: one reservation covering both cities, one fare quoted upfront, one number to call, and one company accountable if a flight goes sideways and the connecting leg has to move.
That structure explains the 80% private figure better than any theory about traveler preference. People are not booking private because they stopped wanting a shuttle. They are booking whatever fits each leg, from one place, because doing that once beats doing it twice in two cities.
How to decide
Three questions settle most of it.
How many of you are there? Two or fewer, shared is likely the better value. Four or more, price a private van before assuming shared is cheaper.
How much slack is in your schedule? Shared rides trade time for money. If you have no time to trade, the math does not work.
How many legs does the trip have? For a single ride in your own city, almost anything works. For a round trip across two cities, booking both ends at once is worth more than most travelers expect.
None of these has a universally right answer, which is the useful part. The data says most travelers end up in a private vehicle, but a fifth of them chose shared and were probably right to. The decision is worth thirty seconds of thought rather than habit, because the cheapest option and the best option are frequently not the same ride.