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Peter Pan Rolls into Its Fourth Generation

By Joseph Bednar June 20, 2024

Staying True to Their Routes

Melissa and Peter A. Picknelly (far left and right) with fourth-generation company leaders Lauryn Picknelly-DuBois, Alyssa Picknelly-Dube, and Peter B. Picknelly. (Staff Photo)

The past five years have brought a raft of challeges to the world of tourism and transportation.

The biggest one? Survival.

“The worldwide pandemic was tough on our industry, and many other industries,” Peter A. Picknelly, chairman and CEO of Peter Pan Bus Lines, told BusinessWest. “For three years, we had the government using our tax dollars to tell people not to use our service.”

There’s a bit of edge in his voice as he brings up topics like shutting down travel, and then restrictions like social distancing that accompanied its gradual return.

“But we survived, and we’re thriving now. We’ve invested $25 million in new equipment in the last couple of years. We’re modernizing our fleet, which is what our consumer wants; they want a nice, clean, modern bus. And we’re continuing to expand our route structure,” he said, noting that Peter Pan serves about 100 locations in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states.

“We listen to our customers — where they want to go — and we expand where it makes sense. We recently expanded to Newark, New Jersey, and a suburb right outside of Baltimore called White Marsh. And we’ve added service on Cape Cod. We’re always looking at new areas.”

But the company is also looking to the future in other ways, most notably some emerging leadership from the fourth generation of this family business launched by Picknelly’s grandfather in 1933.

“You just don’t see workers commuting to work, and if they do, they’re not working Mondays and Fridays. I mean, the full-time office worker is just not rebounding. It’s better than it was, and it will eventually come back, I think, but some businesses are just going to thrive on people that work remotely.”

“I kind of grew up just learning from him and wanting to work here,” said Peter B. Picknelly, one of three children of Peter A. and Melissa Picknelly (the company’s vice president) now working at Peter Pan. A fourth is still in college and mulling career goals.

“I had no doubt in my mind that this is what I wanted to do,” added the younger Peter, who is the company’s director of Safety & Security. “I grew up going to school and trying to better myself so I could then come into the business. That’s what I always wanted to do.”

That’s a story his father can relate to. “I’m the third generation; Peter and his sisters are the fourth,” he said. “But I never forced them into it. When I grew up, some kids wanted to be baseball players or football players. All I wanted to do was follow my father and grandfather. And I can’t tell you how proud I am that our kids chose to do that — but it was their decision.”

Peter A. Picknelly, standing before some portraits of his predecessors, says there are very few family-owned bus companies in the U.S. today.
Staff Photo

Other fourth-generation leaders at Peter Pan include Lauryn Picknelly-DuBois, who was promoted two years ago to controller, and Alyssa Picknelly-Dube, who is involved with the Maintenance division. (A fourth child is still in college and mulling career goals.)

“There are very few family-operated bus companies in the United States anymore,” their father said. “Here, the fourth generation is already set, and they’re still in their 20s. I think it assures our employees and our customers that we will be around for a long time. They are doing an amazing job.”

All Aboard

They’re doing it at a time when public-transportation demographics might be changing, but bus travel clearly remains important.

Peter Pan specializes in travel that’s longer than a typical work commute, but within 200 miles — a distance that can be covered as quickly as flying, once the airport time is factored in, the senior Picknelly explained.

These days, most travelers are between 18 and 35 years old or over 50, he added. “They may have an automobile, but the bus is more affordable. We go city center to city center. And parking can be extremely expensive in some areas, and hard to find.”

He added that the pandemic hit the work-commuter customer base hard, and it’s still struggling, at around 60% of pre-pandemic volume.

“You just don’t see workers commuting to work, and if they do, they’re not working Mondays and Fridays. I mean, the full-time office worker is just not rebounding. It’s better than it was, and it will eventually come back, I think, but some businesses are just going to thrive on people that work remotely.”

That said, the longer-distance service — say, Boston to New York or New York to Philadelphia — is booming, especially as gas prices have remained high and cities have gone to congestion pricing.

And gas prices do make a difference, he added. “You can instantly see it when gas prices go up. Our cost of operation goes up when fuel goes up — it’s our third-largest cost. But it’s outweighed by the fact that more people seek an alternative. When fuel hits $3, $4 a gallon, you can see an instant surge.”

That said, today’s buses are much more fuel-efficient, Picknelly said, and feature an anti-idling function that shuts them off when they idle at a gate or while parked for more than five minutes (but not while in traffic).

“There are situations when the idling won’t turn off — say it’s middle of winter and it’s freezing, and you want to heat up a little bit. That will override the five-minute idle shutdown,” Peter B. Picknelly said. “Same thing if it’s too hot — to keep the bus cool, it’ll override it.”

Other features of a modern bus include better-designed seats, video and Wi-Fi, and cameras that capture a 360-degree view of the bus for safety purposes.

Peter B. Picknelly, director of Safety & Security, is one of three fourth-generation family members so far to have chosen Peter Pan as a career.
Staff Photo

As for those who drive the buses — the current fleet is about 200 vehicles — the younger Picknelly said the workforce crunch was severe a couple of years ago, but hiring has picked up considerably since. “We get a lot of applications every single day, so we’re able to be a little bit more picky when it comes to the driver force.”

His father noted that hiring is easier in some areas than in others. “We’re constantly hiring. But while Cape Cod and Boston are difficult locations, with our driver forces in New York and D.C., we have plenty of applications.”

Peter Pan has been receiving more applications these days from younger people, and the company has brought on employees in the process of getting their commercial driver’s license, and even reimbursed them for it.

“It’s a very good job if you like to drive and you want to deal with people,” Picknelly said. “Our drivers choose what routes they want to operate and when they want to work. Our position is, if you like doing what you want to do, you’re going to do a better job.

“But you’ve got to like to drive, and you’ve got to like to deal with people,” he added. “We can train just about anybody to drive a bus. But you can’t train someone to have good customer-service skills. And wanting to drive is just something you’ve got to have a passion for. Because that’s what we do.”

The younger Picknelly agreed. “It’s good getting these young people on board because most of the time they’re pretty loyal, and they want to stick with the company for a long time. We have people who have been here for so long because they came on when they were younger and were extremely loyal to the company, and that’s what we’re hoping to get now.”

Shifting Gears

Looking to the future, Peter Pan continues to find more ways to be the transportation mode of choice for its customers, especially younger riders, and that means making their travel plans easier.

To that end, the company recently announced a new strategic partnership with Trailways, extending its network of destinations, as well as a strategic alliance with Amtrak.

“So you can take a train somewhere, and then they’ll connect to a bus, and we can take you right to the city center,” Peter A. Picknelly said, and from there, rideshares can take over. “We’re also forming alliances with Ubers and Lyfts where you can coordinate being picked up wherever we drop you off, and instantly getting in an Uber and taking it to your final destination. Because of this coordination, more and more people are saying they don’t need to drive, particularly young people that live in the big city.”

“We can train just about anybody to drive a bus. But you can’t train someone to have good customer-service skills. And wanting to drive is just something you’ve got to have a passion for.”

Statistics bear that trend out. Last year, driver’s license applications actually went down, reversing a 50-year upward trend, he noted.

“It’s so convenient. If you go to Europe, taking public transportation is always involved, and you’re seeing more of that here. It’s way more convenient, and with the amenities in the vehicle, you can work or entertain yourself while you’re traveling. You can’t do that when you’re driving.”

Peter Pan also maintains a model of managing terminals — another one of Peter B. Picknelly’s roles — in its destination cities, with amenities like food, restrooms, a service counter, and a pickup area, instead of the model of picking up and dropping off on unattended corners.

“We don’t like picking up on a street corner like some of these other bus companies,” Peter B. added. “We like going into a terminal or a specific designated area, so they can have that one-on-one personal experience with our employees if they have an issue or have any questions or concerns. We’re a customer-driven business, so we like pleasing the customers.”

About 15% of Peter Pan’s business, meanwhile, is charter service to destinations not on the regular route plan.

“Charters are very big, and in the summer, it picks up a lot. There are people who go out to Saratoga Race Course on the weekend; that’s a very popular place. We’ll take them wherever.”

One shift that occurred over the pandemic years has been a move toward online booking, his father added.

“Prior to COVID, about 50% of our riders would buy their ticket a half-hour before departure, in person. Now, 90% of our sales now are in advance. Most people are booking within three days of their trip, online.”

But, as mentioned up top, the biggest story of the pandemic for Peter Pan was … well, simply surviving it, and coming out stronger on the other side, with plans for the future and a band of 20-something Picknellys ready to evolve into stronger leadership roles.

“We’re really proud of all of our staff,” their father said. “Listen, 40% of all bus companies didn’t make it through the pandemic. We did, and we’re thriving. We’ve had to change our focus on longer-distance trips, less commuter-related, more group travel, but we’re doing well.”

Peter B. Picknelly agreed. “In hindsight, COVID was horrible, but it made us think about how we could run things differently here, and it’s been beneficial.”

Peter Pan Charts a Route to Continued Growth

By Joseph Bednar May 14, 2019

Features

Driving Forces

Peter Picknelly says Peter Pan is taking steps that make the company more agile, a necessary trait in a changing bus business.

Peter Picknelly says the higher prices that consumers are experiencing at the gas pump are a fairly recent phenomenon, with the surge coming over the past few months or so.

But in the bus business, such changes to the landscape can, and usually do, have a quick and profound impact. And Easter weekend provided ample evidence of this.

“Business was up 18% over the same period a year ago — we were really busy over Easter weekend,” said Picknelly. “When gas prices go up, we see an increase in ridership, and they’ve been going up.

“It’s almost instantaneous — when fuel prices go up, it hurts our customers, and they look for alternatives,” he went on. “Meanwhile, holidays are generally a pretty good barometer of how business is going overall, and we saw that Easter weekend.”

Elaborating, he said that fluctuating gas prices — they come down as often as they go up — are just one of the reasons why agility is perhaps the best quality a bus company can possess these days, and also why Springfield-based Peter Pan is currently taking a number of steps to become even more agile.

“It’s almost instantaneous — when fuel prices go up, it hurts our customers, and they look for alternatives.”

Indeed, the company is expanding its fleet — five new buses were recently delivered, and 10 more are on order, far more than the number replaced in what would be considered a typical year — and also adding new routes, hiring more drivers, and utilizing technology (a revamped website and a new app) to make it easier to know where all those buses are going and to buy seats on them.

Meanwhile, Peter Pan will soon have its own ticket counter at the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Manhattan, a long-awaited, very expensive, and logistically complicated undertaking that Picknelly said will give the company invaluable visibility in the city where it does its highest volume of business.

All these steps, as noted, are designed to make the company more agile and better able to thrive in an always-changing marketplace, but one where bus travel is seemingly as popular as ever, and perhaps even more so as younger generations eschew the automobile and look to other — generally simple and inexpensive — ways to get from here to there.

Peter Pan is currently in an expansion mode, adding new buses, drivers, and routes.

“What the buses specialize in is high-frequency service at very reasonable fares — and that’s what people are looking for,” said Picknelly, who described Peter Pan as “once again the fastest-growing bus line in America,” meaning it has held that distinction once, if not a few times, and he believes it does again, especially as he watches many competitors scale back.

For this issue, BusinessWest talked at length with Picknelly about why he feels he can make that claim and the specific steps that back up that boast.

Route Causes

Picknelly told BusinessWest that as part of the process of ordering those new coaches he mentioned — each with a price tag of roughly $550,000 — he a few other team members (his wife, Melissa Picknelly, vice president, and Marketing Director Danielle Veronesi, to be specific) spent a considerable amount of time recently trying out some options for the seats in those vehicles.

Decades ago, there probably wouldn’t have been a need for such an exercise — a seat was a seat. But that was then. These days, as with seemingly everything else you can buy, there are options, and lots of them.

“The average ride on our buses is three and a half hours, and we’re looking to make it as comfortable as possible,” he explained. “There’s a lot to look at with these seats — how the seatbelt clicks, how they adjust, how comfortable they are … the one I think we’re going to go with is actually an inch and a half lower than others, which we think will provide for a better ride.”

That attention to detail with seats speaks volumes about the overall mindset driving the company — pun intended. It’s a customer-based approach that is spawning a number of new initiatives, starting with the new buses and why they’ve been ordered.

Picknelly said the coaches the company buys, like workhorse planes bought by the airlines, can be in service for decades. But eventually they need to be replaced, and in a typical year the company will cycle out a least a few.
But this year’s order placed with Motor Coach Industries (MCI) is especially large and includes not only replacement buses, but ones needed to cover new routes and expected heavier traffic on some existing routes.

In that first category are new routes on Cape Cod and between New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C.

On the Cape, the company, which in the past only brought riders as far as Hyannis, now services just about every community between there and Provincetown, said Picknelly, an aggressive expansion effort that began at the start of this year.

“We’re expecting that to be huge,” he said, adding that bus service can and should be viewed as an alternative to trying to drive to those communities, especially in the summer. “We’re running express service and we’re connecting in from Logan Airport, downtown Boston, and New York City — those are our biggest destinations to Cape Cod.”

Elaborating, he said the company currently runs eight buses a day between Boston and Hyannis, and will expand that number to 12 in the summer. Meanwhile, it currently runs two a day between Hyannis and Provincetown, and will at least double that with the summer schedule.

Further down the coast, the company recently (meaning just last week) expanded service between three of the biggest cities it serves — New York, Baltimore, and Washington — to essentially provide more options for customers.

“We currently serve Philly to New York, Baltimore to New York, and D.C. to New York,” he said, prior to the expansion of the schedule. “We’re now going be serving Philadelphia to Baltimore and Philadelphia to D.C.; we’re expanding our route to connect those cities together.”

The reason for such expansion is obvious — demand, he went on, adding that the company will start with seven buses a day to each city, but those numbers could rise.

And there could be still more additions to the schedule after the Encore Boston Harbor casino opens its doors next month, said Picknelly, adding that the company is in discussions with ownership about running buses from the casino to South Station and other connecting points, shuttles, and other work.

As he talked about all this growth and the potential for more to come, Picknelly said technology has played a big part in it. As one example, he cited a revamped website that went live just before Easter, one that not only heightens awareness of routes and schedules, but greatly simplifies the process of buying a ticket online.

And the buying public is moving increasingly in that direction, he said, noting that today, 80% of tickets are purchased online, a number that moves higher with each passing year, although there are still many who still walk up and buy at the counter — especially in New York, which explains the company’s huge investment at the Port Authority.

This heavy volume of online sales brings benefits for the customers, obviously, but also for Peter Pan, said Picknelly, adding that they take a lot of the guesswork out of scheduling and staffing buses.

“In the olden days, for lack of a better term, we would have a consistent schedule, seven days a week the same schedule,” he explained. “Now, because people buy tickets in advance — it’s a reservation and it’s a guaranteed seat — we know exactly how many people are going to be on the bus, and we modify our schedules accordingly.

“In many cases, our schedules are different on Tuesdays and Wednesdays than they are on Thursdays, and very different from what they are on Fridays, Saturdays, or Mondays,” he went on. “We adjust our schedule product based on consumer demand on a daily basis; before it was guesswork and ‘set it and kind of forget it.’ Now, we have staff looking at the numbers and the trends, and we adjust every day.”

Elaborating, he said that, if the 2 o’clock bus to Philadelphia is filling up, the company may well add a 2:30 run. And with a new app the company is rolling out in a few days, a customer can, among other things, change his or reservation from the 2 to the 2:30, if they know well in advance that they’re going to be running a little late.

The app will also make buying tickets even easier, because it will log previous purchases, recognize trends, and enable the consumer to rebook a schedule with one click, said Picknelly, adding that many of these developments are unique within the industry.

Also unique will be the ability to buy what Picknelly called ‘commuter tickets,’ 10 tickets at once, for example, at a discount price that consumers can load onto their phone and use whenever they want.

“No one else is doing that in our industry,” he said, using that phrase to refer to many of the recent innovations. “And these are things that we think are game changers.”

The Ride Stuff

Returning to the subject of online buying and the benefits it brings, Picknelly said the company can make adjustments for weather, holidays, special events, and, yes, soaring gas prices.

“If we know there’s a snowstorm coming, we can cut schedules and combine them,” he explained. “We’re able to forecast much better and adjust our product based on consumer demand. We’re much more agile than we used to be, and the consumer benefits from that.”

There’s that word again, and it’s a word you didn’t hear much when it came to transportation in general and bus companies in particular. But you do now, and Peter Pan keeps finding new ways to be agile and benefit from that important quality.

That’s a big reason why Picknelly believes that, once again, this is the fastest-growing bus company in the country.

George O’Brien can be reached at [email protected]

Peter Pan Rolls into Its Fourth Generation