Munich Airport replaced seventy pool cars with three shared minivans
An airport is a small city with no natural bus route. ShuttleMe moves employees between terminals, cargo areas and offices on request — and carries six times as many of them.
- Setting
- Airport campus, ~1,500 ha
- Service model
- Corporate commuting
- Replaces
- Pool car fleet
- Booking
- App and web
Results
Six times as many staff journeys carried each day as the service it replaced.
A pool of around seventy cars replaced by three shared minivans.
Vehicles move when staff request them, not on a fixed loop around the site.
The challenge
A site built for planes, with no sensible way to cross it
Munich Airport spreads across roughly 1,500 hectares of terminals, cargo halls, maintenance areas and office buildings. Staff need to move between them all day, and the distances are too long to walk but too short and too unpredictable to time-table a bus around.
The answer had been a pool of around seventy cars. They were always booked and mostly parked — occupying ground the airport could use for anything else, and requiring a fleet that had to be bought, insured, maintained and replaced.
What we deployed
Three shared vehicles, virtual stops across the site, and pooled requests
- 01Shared minivans
Three vehicles sized for pooled staff trips rather than single-occupant journeys.
- 02Virtual stops
Pickup points at terminals, cargo halls and office entrances — no infrastructure built.
- 03Staff-only access
Access controlled to employees, with the airport keeping full operational control.
- 04Pooled assignment
Requests heading the same way are grouped in real time so vehicles stay full.
Fewer vehicles, more journeys
Pooling is what makes the arithmetic work: when several staff heading the same direction share one vehicle, three minivans absorb the work of a car pool an order of magnitude larger.
Cost and utilisation move in opposite directions, which is the point. Three vans in near-constant use carry more people than seventy cars did sitting parked — and cost a fraction of the fleet they replaced to buy, insure and maintain.
How the assignment rules workOn site
Branded as the airport’s own service, not as a supplier’s. 
Staff pick a virtual stop by name, and the request joins whichever vehicle is already heading that way. 
The whole fleet: three minivans, replacing a pool of around seventy cars.
Philip WagnerExpert Airport Master Planning, Munich Airport“It is way faster — we do not need to search for a parking spot, we don’t need to get the keys. We just book on the app, hop into the car and get shuttled to where we want to be.”
Similar challenges
The problem isn’t specific to airports
What made Munich hard is not aviation. It is a large site, buildings spread too far apart to walk between, and staff whose journeys start and end at different points throughout the day — the conditions that defeat a timetable and make a pool fleet sit idle.
Business parks, hospital estates, industrial sites and university campuses all share them. Where the pattern holds, so does the model: fewer shared vehicles, virtual stops instead of built infrastructure, and requests pooled as they arrive.
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