College Transit: home for the holidays and more
-- Sande Snead Fulk ('82)

Jason Sfaelos ('96) is from Long Island, N.Y., and when his parents dropped him off at JMU for the first day of his freshman year, they told him, "We love you son, but we're not coming back [to Harrisonburg] to get you at Thanksgiving."

After encountering the difficulty of finding a "student-affordable" and convenient direct flight from Shenandoah Airport,
Sfaelos began working on finding a charter bus company to take him and other tri-state (New York, New Jersey and Connecticut) resi-dents home for the holidays. "It's amazing what you can get done when you have no other choice," Sfaelos remembers.

The freshman contracted directly with a charter bus company. "I asked them to give me a driver and a 55-passenger bus, and I said I'd fill it." Sfaelos sold tickets for $62 round trip and got 96 JMU students home for Thanksgiving his first year at Madison. For his efforts, he earned enough for a free trip for himself. It was 1992, and College Transit was born.

This year, Sfaelos took his company a step further and expanded charter bus service offerings to 10 other college campuses including Texas Tech, Auburn, the University of Virginia and Clemson. "These are schools that fit the model," he explains. "They are mostly in the middle of nowhere, and mass transit is either expensive or cumbersome."

Sfaelos is based in Washington, D.C., and has no help in running his company other than his wife, Amy Foutz Sfaelos ('98), who helps with customer service and public relations. The company does not have a presence at any of the campuses it serves. "Everything is done online," Sfaelos says. "Students can find out what destinations are available, plan their trip and buy their ticket on our Web site, www.collegetransit.com/."

Amazingly, the Internet was not a viable resource for organizing charter trips when Sfaelos founded College Transit. Although he continued to offer the charter trips from JMU even after he graduated, Sfaelos pursued other career interests. He majored in political science and minored in business with the knowledge that he wanted to work on Wall Street. He was a bond trader for a few years and then moved to Washington, D.C., where he worked for Sprint and began pursuing his M.B.A. at George Washington University. He graduated in May. "We used the College Transit idea as an M.B.A. project, and as we worked on it, I thought there's no reason I can't pursue this on a larger scale."

Sfaelos doesn't own the $250,000 buses that take students home on school breaks. Instead, his company focuses on its core competency -- understanding the needs of each campus. He develops relationships with bus vendors that are high quality and safe. The bus companies take care of screening the drivers and maintaining the equipment.

Ticket prices for a charter bus trip depend on the distance, but from JMU to Long Island, the price is about $140 round trip. From JMU to Vienna, it's about $49. College Transit took five busloads of college students home to the tri-state area this past Thanksgiving and two busloads at Christmas. The company also offers charter trips for freshman orientation programs and Spring Break.

"We've established a college scholarship in each school where we have a presence," Sfaelos says. "It's our way of giving back." At JMU, Sfaelos supports the Craig M. Blass ('96) Memorial Scholarship to remember his friend who died at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. People interested in making a donation to the Blass Scholarship can contact the JMU development office at (800) 296-6162.