Short answer: retainer and RFP work is the most predictable revenue a ground transportation company can carry. You win it by finding bids early, pricing to a defined scope instead of a guess, and answering procurement's compliance questions before they have to ask.
One signed shuttle retainer can be worth more than a hundred retail airport runs — and it renews. This playbook covers how to find the work, how to bid it, and how to keep it.
Where the contracts actually are
Copy link to section: Where the contracts actually areRetail rides find you. Contracts don't. The operators with a full retainer book go looking in five places:
- Corporate travel managers. Mid-size companies with regular executive travel, board meetings, and client visits. Ask existing corporate accounts who manages their travel policy.
- Hospitals and medical campuses. Staff shuttles between buildings and parking structures, plus discharge transport.
- Universities and private schools. Campus loops, athletics travel, and event shuttles.
- Film, TV and production companies. Crew transport for the length of a shoot — short contracts, high volume, fast decisions.
- Hotels and conference centres. Airport shuttles and event overflow, usually renewed annually.
Public bids get posted on municipal, state/provincial, university, and health-authority procurement portals. Register as a vendor on the portals in your market and set alert emails for "transportation," "shuttle," "ground transport," and "vehicle services." Most operators lose bids simply by finding them three days before close.
Read the scope before you price it
Copy link to section: Read the scope before you price itEvery RFP hides its real cost in the scope section. Before you put a number on paper, extract:
- Hours of coverage. Not trips — hours. A 5am to 9pm campus loop is two shifts and a relief driver, not one.
- Vehicle dedication. Does a vehicle have to sit on site, unavailable for other work? Dedicated capacity is priced on availability, not mileage.
- Term and escalation. A three-year term without an annual escalator is a three-year pay cut. Ask for a CPI-linked adjustment or a fixed 3-4% annual step.
- Insurance and compliance minimums. Higher liability limits, additional-insured endorsements, drug-and-alcohol programs, and background-check standards all cost money. Price them in.
- Reporting obligations. Monthly on-time performance, ridership counts, and incident logs. Cheap if your software produces them; expensive if a person compiles them by hand.
- Penalty clauses. Late-arrival or missed-run penalties are common in shuttle contracts. Know the exposure before you sign.
Price on capacity, not per trip
Copy link to section: Price on capacity, not per tripRetail pricing logic breaks on contract work. Use one of three models:
- Hourly dedicated. Vehicle plus driver for a block of hours, with a daily minimum. Cleanest for shuttles and production work.
- Monthly retainer. A fixed monthly fee for an agreed service level, with overage billed hourly. Best when volume is steady and both sides want predictable budgeting.
- Per-run with a floor. Fixed price per completed run with a guaranteed monthly minimum, so a slow month doesn't sink the route.
Build the number from the bottom: driver wage plus burden, vehicle cost per hour (payment, insurance, fuel, maintenance reserve), overhead allocation, then margin. If you can't state the contract's gross margin per vehicle hour, you're guessing.
What procurement is actually scoring
Copy link to section: What procurement is actually scoringBuyers rarely pick the cheapest bid — they pick the lowest-risk one that clears the price threshold. Scoring sheets consistently reward:
- Certificates of insurance matching the exact limits requested, attached, current
- Documented driver screening, training, and safety programs
- A named account manager and a single escalation phone number
- Demonstrated capacity — fleet size, backup vehicles, affiliate coverage for peaks
- Consolidated invoicing with cost-centre coding
- Reporting samples included in the bid, not promised later
Attach real examples. A one-page sample on-time performance report and a sample consolidated invoice beat three paragraphs describing them.
Deliver like the renewal depends on it — it does
Copy link to section: Deliver like the renewal depends on it — it doesRetainers are won once and lost monthly. The operational habits that keep them:
- Recurring trips scheduled as recurring, not re-entered weekly by hand.
- Automatic status milestones so on-time performance is measured, not remembered.
- Monthly reporting sent before it's requested, with a one-paragraph summary on top.
- A quarterly review call with the contract owner covering performance, incidents, and upcoming volume changes.
- A defined failure protocol. When a bus breaks down, the client should hear from you before they hear from a rider.
Where the software does the work
Copy link to section: Where the software does the workKymark handles recurring contract scheduling, account-level rate cards, batch consolidated invoicing with cost codes, and utilization and on-time reporting per account — which is most of what a procurement team asks you to prove every month. See the reporting features or start a free 14-day trial.
Related reading: Corporate account onboarding · Transportation dispatch buyer's guide.
