Our Team — Komodo Airport Transfer
We do not run a driver pool. We run a roster. Every person who meets you at LBJ arrivals, plans your route, or coordinates your yacht handoff has a name, a face, and a long history on these roads.
How Our Team Is Structured
The travel-industry default is a “driver pool” — a list of names a dispatcher pulls from when a booking comes in. That model lets a marketplace scale fast, but it strips accountability. The driver who took the booking is not the driver who shows up. You have no relationship with either.
We run the opposite model. We have eighteen drivers on our payroll. They report to a senior driver lead who inspects every vehicle weekly. They are dispatched by a small operations team in Labuan Bajo who knows every guest profile in advance. They are supported by a guest-relations and corporate sales layer who handles bookings before the driver ever sees them. Six people in this section run that system day-to-day. Below them, twelve more drivers and four support staff round out the company.
This is what “local specialist, not marketplace” means in practice — a team you can put a name to, all the way from the pickup desk to the boot of the car.
Team Profiles
Andi Wijaya — Founder & Director
Role: Founder & Director
Based: Labuan Bajo
Languages: Bahasa Indonesia, English, Manggarai (local Flores dialect)
Andi grew up in Labuan Bajo when it was still a fishing village with one paved road. He started in the tourism industry in 2010 as a fixer for a small Australian dive operator, then moved to inbound logistics with a Bali-based travel agency. In 2014 he returned to Labuan Bajo full-time after watching the airport begin its first international expansion phase, and started Komodo Airport Transfer in 2015 with a single Toyota Innova. Today he sits at the centre of every operational decision the company makes — from fleet specification to driver vetting to the design of our booking process.
Andi’s day starts at 05:00 with a check on the morning flight schedule and ends after the last red-eye Garuda touches down at 22:35. He still drives airport runs when the dispatch desk is short-staffed, which is one of the rare moments you might meet the founder at LBJ arrivals himself.
“Every driver on our roster has carried my own family from this airport at some point. That is the test I use. If I would put my mother in the back seat of that Innova, that driver is on the team.”
Liam Carter — Operations Manager
Role: Operations Manager
Based: Labuan Bajo
Languages: English, Bahasa Indonesia, basic Mandarin
Liam came to Komodo in 2017 to run a liveaboard dive operation out of Marina Bayview. After eight years on the water, he came ashore in 2024 to run the operations side of Komodo Airport Transfer. His background in dive logistics means he understands the ground-handling demands of the liveaboard segment in a way most ground-transport operators do not — wet gear protocols, marina pier scheduling, dive-tank handling, the difference between a 06:00 yacht boarding window and a 09:30 one.
Liam owns the dispatch system, the SLA tracking, and the relationship with our hotel and yacht-charter partners. If your booking has a complication — a delayed connecting flight, a yacht ETA shift, a gear-handling question — Liam is the person whose phone rings.
“The thing I learned in eight years running dive boats is that the trip starts the moment the guest steps off the plane, not the moment they step on the boat. We’re the first hour of their Komodo experience. We have to be perfect.”
Made Sukrawan — Senior Driver Lead
Role: Senior Driver Lead, Fleet Inspection
Based: Labuan Bajo (originally Tabanan, Bali)
Languages: Bahasa Indonesia, Balinese, English, basic Japanese
Pak Made has been driving guests around Indonesia since 2005. He started in Bali doing private day tours through Ubud and Tanah Lot, then moved to Labuan Bajo in 2018 when his son took a job at the airport. He has driven Komodo arrivals for seven years and now leads the driver roster — vetting new hires, running weekly mechanical inspections on every vehicle, training drivers on hotel-arrival protocols, and stepping in personally for VIP and honeymoon assignments.
If you book the Toyota Alphard for a honeymoon transfer, there is a strong chance Pak Made is the driver behind the wheel. His record across two thousand-plus trips: zero incidents, zero customer complaints, zero late arrivals attributable to driver delay.
“An Alphard is not a car. It is a moment in someone’s holiday. I treat it that way.”
Sofia Almeida — Guest Relations Lead
Role: Guest Relations Lead
Based: Labuan Bajo
Languages: English, Portuguese (Brazil), Spanish, Bahasa Indonesia
Sofia spent four years on the concierge desk at AYANA Komodo Waecicu Beach before joining us in 2024. That background means she knows the inbound-guest experience from the resort side — what guests have already been promised by the hotel, what tends to confuse them on arrival, what they wish someone had told them before booking. She owns our pre-arrival communication: the WhatsApp thread that opens five minutes after you book, the ICS calendar invite, and the day-before reminder.
For Latin American and Brazilian guests — a fast-growing share of our bookings since the Condé Nast 2026 Asia ranking — Sofia is the contact point. She also handles wedding-coordination enquiries, which often require eight to ten cars and synchronised timing.
“Most of my work happens before the driver ever shows up. By the time the car is at the kerb, the guest already knows what’s about to happen. That’s the standard.”
Pieter van der Berg — Dive & Liveaboard Coordinator
Role: Dive & Liveaboard Coordinator
Based: Labuan Bajo (originally Utrecht, Netherlands)
Languages: English, Dutch, German, Bahasa Indonesia
Pieter is a PADI Master Scuba Diver Trainer who has logged over 4,000 dives in Komodo waters since 2010. He ran a dive shop on the Marina Bayview side until 2023, when he joined our team specifically to handle the dive and liveaboard segment of our airport-transfer business. If you are arriving for a liveaboard pickup, yacht charter transfer or a day tour with transfer, Pieter has built the route, vetted the timing, and confirmed the handoff with the boat side.
He is also the person who decided we would carry waterproof gear bags as standard in the Hiace fleet — a small operational detail, but one that has eliminated almost every “wet BCD on a leather seat” complaint we used to get.
“Komodo’s dive sites have specific tide windows. So does our airport. If your transfer pickup is sloppy, you miss the slack-tide dive. I built the dive-transfer side so that does not happen.”
Yuki Tanaka — Asia Markets Manager
Role: Asia Markets Manager
Based: Labuan Bajo (originally Osaka, Japan)
Languages: Japanese, English, Bahasa Indonesia, basic Mandarin
Yuki spent six years at JTB Indonesia handling outbound Japanese travellers into Bali and Komodo before joining us in early 2025. The Singapore Scoot direct service launch and the Hong Kong corporate-travel uptick have made the Asian short-haul markets our fastest-growing segment, and Yuki runs that side of the business.
She handles bilingual booking confirmations for Japanese, Singaporean and Hong Kong guests; coordinates with our Komodo Luxury yacht sister brand on combined bookings from these markets; and runs the relationship with the inbound Japanese tour operators who funnel high-value cruise charterers our way.
“Japanese travellers do not enjoy negotiating. They enjoy clarity. Our fixed-price-in-USD-locked-at-booking model is the single thing that has driven repeat bookings in this market. They tell their friends.”
Our Drivers — A Roster, Not a Pool
Below the senior team, we run a roster of eighteen drivers. Twelve are full-time on the airport-transfer rotation. Six are senior on-call drivers used for VIP, honeymoon, wedding and corporate work — they include Pak Made above. We have not subcontracted a single airport pickup since 2018.
Every driver on the roster has cleared three hurdles before being given an airport assignment:
- A baseline English fluency check — not perfect English, but functional enough to handle the standard arrival exchange (greeting, luggage, drive time, hotel confirmation) and respond to common guest questions about Komodo, the road, or the next day’s plan.
- A four-week shadow period — riding alongside a senior driver before being dispatched solo. New drivers do not handle their first airport pickup independently.
- A weekly vehicle inspection — Pak Made physically walks around every car on Sunday mornings. Tyres, AC compressor, windscreen wipers, child-seat anchors, USB ports, water-bottle holders, dashboard fluid levels. Cars that fail inspection are off the roster until the issue is fixed.
Drivers also rotate through formal training cycles three times a year — a topic we cover in the next section.
How We Train — Komodo’s Toughest Customer Standards
We borrowed our training model from the luxury hospitality industry — specifically from the four years Sofia spent at AYANA Komodo. The premise is that a driver is the first staff member a guest interacts with on arrival, often before they even reach the resort, and so the driver’s standards must match those of a 5-star concierge.
The training cycle covers four modules:
Module 1 — Luxury arrival protocol. Greeting script in English (and Mandarin / Japanese / Portuguese as needed), name-board posture, baggage handling without rushing the guest, climate control and water-bottle protocol, and silent-cabin etiquette for tired guests who do not want to chat.
Module 2 — Hotel-arrival familiarity. Every driver memorises the gate access, parking arrangements, lobby procedures and luggage drop-off points for the twenty-five most-booked Labuan Bajo hotels, from Meruorah downtown to Ta’aktana Luxury Collection on the hill to Sudamala Resort Seraya on the boat.
Module 3 — Dive-gear and yacht-marina handling. Wet gear protocol, BCD and regulator handling, marina pier numbers, vessel boarding windows, and the dive-tank-versus-boat-supplied-tank question that often confuses new arrivals. Pieter runs this module.
Module 4 — Komodo National Park session timing. Since the 1,000-visitor-per-day quota came into effect, our drivers are expected to know which guests are on which session window (morning / midday / afternoon) and adjust their next-day pickup planning accordingly. This module is updated quarterly as the quota system evolves.
The cycle runs three times a year. Drivers who do not complete the cycle are not dispatched on airport runs in the following quarter.
This is the level of care we put into a transfer that, on paper, costs $25.
Speak with Us
If you have read this far, you already know more about our team than most travellers know about the airport transfer they have booked. The next step is the conversation.
For booking enquiries (English / international):
WhatsApp: +62 811 3810 8110
Email: sales@komodoluxury.com
For dispatch / Indonesian-language enquiries:
WhatsApp: +62 811 3823 875
For agency / hotel concierge / wedding partnerships:
Email Sofia or Yuki directly: sales@komodoluxury.com (subject line “Partnership — [Brand]”)
For yacht charter co-ordination:
We hand-off to our sister brand komodoluxury.com for vessel bookings — but the airport-to-marina transfer stays with us.
For LBJ fast-track bookings:
Bundled with transfer through komodofasttrack.com.
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The most-booked airport routes:
LBJ → AYANA Komodo · LBJ → Plataran Komodo · LBJ → Ta’aktana Luxury Collection · LBJ → Meruorah Komodo