Ride-sharing companies such as Uber may cater for casual consumers but their B2C model isn’t suited to business travellers, according to a key figure at Gett UK.
Gett’s One Transport platform works directly with other taxi fleets, using technology to connect them with customers within local, national and worldwide corporations. In contrast, Uber acquires drivers through its app.
Gett says that the benefit of One Transport – which it took over as part of the acquisition of Mountview House Group two years ago and has now integrated with its own technology – is that the service delivery aspect, invoicing and booking float are all taken care of in one place.
“Uber and Lyft are focused mainly on the consumer,” Gett UK’s head of enterprise Wesley Bishop told BusinessCloud. “In the business sector, there is more than one buyer or stakeholder: the person who is procuring the service, the person who’s booking the service and the person who is travelling with the service.
“We’ve built our products and services around ensuring those three are always catered for first and are always the focus.
“A journey’s not just the journey that is taking place – it’s from when the booking is made all the way through to the bills paid. It’s that entire lifecycle. Everything has to be right.
“All of those have to be catered for in B2B much more than in B2C. I’m not discrediting Uber and Lyft [but] they have seen that this is not their core market.”
Headquartered in Tel Aviv, Israel, Gett’s One Transport platform operates in more than 350 cities in 35 countries around the world.
For the truly globetrotting businessperson, it offers a unique solution, according to Bishop.
“It’s very unusual to have business travellers that only travel in one location,” he said. “People work from many different places and remotely and you need to be able to offer a service that can match that.
“Meanwhile, the industry has grown as a whole but the number of players within it has shrunk.
“There are not as many private hire companies and taxi companies that were around five years ago, let alone ten.”
Bishop says Gett is “very much a tech business” and, seeing the potential of web-based platform One Transport two years ago, worked hard to redesign the service. An app (below) is now in beta testing.
“It was a great product and with some tweaks and improvements, we knew it could be powerful in the terms of what business travellers need, and how it could accelerate Gett’s growth and attract new customers,” he said.
“People don’t want to get their laptop out or sit at a desk to book a car, they want to book it from wherever they are. That’s what we’ve become used to, so having that for business travel is a must.”