How We Measure Group Transportation Demand

The short version

Chicago Party Bus Fun is part of a national booking network for party buses, limousines, shuttle buses, and motorcoaches. Across that network, every request for a quote is saved as a record: the event date, the kind of event, how many passengers, what vehicle was asked for, and when the request came in. We took the 65,687 non-spam records whose event dates fall in 2024 or 2025 and counted patterns in them.

The result is a library of 188 published statistics. They answer practical questions that planners ask us every day: How early do people book a wedding shuttle? Is a prom group usually 15 people or 30? Do concert groups really need a bus, or is a limo Sprinter closer to what most people request?

These are not Chicago-only numbers, and they are not a count of trips or customers. They are inquiry patterns from a large network, published because they are more useful than guesswork — and labeled that way everywhere they appear.

What one record is — and is not

A record is one inquiry. If a maid of honor asks about a Saturday in May, that is one record whether or not she books. If she comes back a week later with a new headcount, that can be a second record. For that reason we always write “inquiries” or “quote requests” and never “customers,” “bookings,” or “trips.”

• Window: event dates from January 1, 2024 through December 31, 2025. The date a record was created is not used for trend analysis, because a large historical import makes creation dates unreliable.
• Event labels: free-text event types are grouped into recognized categories (birthday, wedding, prom, concert, and so on). Labels that are numeric, date-like, mixed, or unrecognizable are excluded rather than guessed.
• Vehicles: the vehicle a person requested and the vehicle that was quoted are kept as separate fields. Vehicle size counts as passenger capacity only when it is a number from 1 to 100.
• Trip notes: we count how many requests mention a category of place, such as a restaurant or a stadium. A mention is not a confirmed stop, categories overlap, and no note text is ever exported.

How complete each field is

Not every inquiry fills in every field. A percentage is always calculated from the records where that field is usable, and weaker fields are treated more cautiously.

Suppression and grading rules

A statistic is published only if the group it describes contains at least 100 records, the counted share contains at least 20, and the remainder contains at least 20. Most published figures rest on far larger groups — the birthday cohort alone is 8,252 records. Each figure is then graded. Grade A means a large cohort and a nearly complete field. Grade B means the figure is useful but needs its qualifier. Grade C figures stay in our research file and are not shown on the site.

Two whole families of figures are held back. Price statistics are excluded because too few records contain a usable quote. Figures built on the CRM’s “Closed” status are excluded from public pages because a status is not proof of a completed trip.

What is covered

Published statistics by subject. Each subject feeds the matching pages in our event guides and fleet pages.

• All dated inquiries · 19
• Bachelorette party · 16
• Birthday · 12
• Limousine · 11
• Wedding · 10
• Bachelor party · 10
• Concert · 10
• Prom · 9
• Sports · 9
• Nightlife · 9
• Wine tour · 9
• Party bus · 9
• Graduation · 8
• 1–10 seats · 5
• 31–40 seats · 5
• 21–30 passengers · 5
• 11–20 seats · 4
• 21–30 seats · 4
• 31–40 passengers · 4
• 41–55 passengers · 4
• Sprinter · 4
• Birthday vs Bachelorette party · 3
• 11–20 passengers · 3
• 56–100 passengers · 3
• 1–10 passengers · 3

How to read a figure on this site

Take this sentence from the prom guide: “Among prom inquiries for 2024–2025 event dates, 74% of requested event dates fell in spring; the full-dataset baseline was 30%.” It tells you that prom demand is compressed into a few weekends, which is why popular vehicles are requested early. It does not tell you that 74% of Chicago proms are in spring, that any particular vehicle is available, or what anyone paid.

Opinion polls are a separate thing entirely. The polls collect votes from visitors and can be small samples; they are never blended into these statistics. If you spot a figure that looks wrong or is missing its qualifier, tell us at partybusexperts@gmail.com and we will correct it under our editorial standards.