Tybee Island offering shuttle service to Savannah for St. Patrick’s Day

TYBEE ISLAND, Ga. (WTOC) - If you’re staying on Tybee Island this St. Patrick’s Day, you can skip parking at the parade thanks to a shuttle service by Old Savannah Tours.

The shuttles are going to run pretty much all day long starting at 6 a.m. on Friday until 1 a.m. on Saturday.

Joey Serpa, the Director of Operations at Old Savannah tours, says taking the shuttle from Tybee to Downtown Savannah is a great way to avoid fighting traffic and worrying about parking.

”It’s a huge operation. Tybee, we normally use about 40 vehicles just for the Tybee back and forth run. They say every 30 minutes, but sometimes we get a little busy and we’re running a little faster than that.”

If you want to use the shuttle, there are four pickup/drop-off locations available on Tybee Island - River’s End Campground and RV Park, the lighthouse, the DeSoto Beach Club, and Hotel Tybee.

The shuttle will run from there, to the pickup/drop-off location in downtown Savannah - the Marriott Savannah Riverfront on the East end of Bay Street- not to be confused with JW Marriott in the Plant Riverside District.

You can buy a wristband at any of the pickup locations.

“That gets you back and forth all day, as many times as you want. Say you forgot something at your bed and breakfast, you need to run back, you want to come back downtown later, your wristband is good all day.”

It’s a convenient option for paradegoers that want to retreat to the calm of Tybee Island at the end of the night and, one hotel owner said, is a good incentive to get people to stay on the island on St. Patrick’s Day weekend.

“We have a good amount of people that decide to stay on Tybee to travel into Savannah for the parade, which hopefully that’ll bring more tourists to the island to be able to travel that way,” said Akash Patel, the CFO of Tybee Lodging Group.

The Old Savannah Tours shuttle is the only shuttle service to and from Tybee on St. Patrick’s Day.

This year, they’re also bringing back a route to and from midtown, with that pickup/drop-off location at the old Sears parking lot at the Oglethorpe mall.

That one runs every hour on the hour, starting at 6 a.m.

Copyright 2023 WTOC. All rights reserved.