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TMCs stepping up
Despite this, TMCs are starting to look at a wider ground transport offering. In April, Amex GBT announced a deal with GroundSpan to offer the latter’s content through Egencia to customers in North America. It is expected that this content will be rolled out to Neo users later in 2023.
Agiito says that offering ground transport via the TMC is still in its infancy. Jake Swithenbank, proposition manager for rail and ground transportation at the TMC, says, “Like most TMCs, we have a taxi provider but the first port of call for most business travellers, if they’re leaving their front door and heading to a train station or an airport, you know it’s going to be a cab.”
Despite the challenges Swithenbank says Agiito will look at proposition items that don’t necessarily add a lot of commercial value as a business. “If it’s the right thing to offer the customer, then we can certainly look at whether we integrate that as a service offering. It is a customer-led offering and if it is what the customer wants then we can do it.”
Jyrney is working with TMCs. TripStax has integrated the Jyrney platform into its own tech stack and will now offer this out to TMCs, with Take Two the first to roll it out.
“We have just launched a new mobile solution which can be white labelled and directly integrated into a TMC’s booking app. We are also integrating directly with profile tools,” says Jyrney’s Price.
As well as fragmented content, the other question is reliability, with missed pick-ups, delays and driver shortages. “With such high failure rates, there is also the question of whether a TMC would actually want to involve themselves in this,” said David Bishop, COO of Gray Dawes.
Harnessing machine learning
The answer, according to Price, is technology. And that technology in Jyrney’s case is artificial intelligence. It has built a predictive engine that uses machine learning using a grant from the UK government. The engine learns from every journey undertaken on the platform to make a prediction of whether the driver will arrive as planned and reach the destination, such as the airport, on time. If it believes it will not be on time, it will find another driver who will be.
The Jyrney engine will flag when a taxi company repeatedly cancels bookings or is regularly late for pick-ups and propose alternatives instead. This can fix many of the problems that corporates and their travellers have relating to reliability.
“Ground transport is perfectly fine 97 to 99 per cent of the time. The passenger is unwilling to forgive that one to three per cent when it’s not,” says Jyrney’s Price.
CMAC also uses algorithms to direct bookings to the best supplier. “We have algorithms built into our system which may be based upon a number of things, such as the type of vehicle requested, the pick-up quality and how many times have they turned down jobs before,” says Micklethwaite.
The company employs people in an operations centre around the clock to provide cover. “If you’re stuck in the Scottish islands, no matter how many times you pressed the button, Uber isn’t going to come,” he says.
“Normally the taxi to the airport is the first product you consume on a trip but it’s pretty much always the last one that you book”
Ground transport can be divided into two distinct parts: the first mile/s (from the home or office to the airport) and the last mile/s (from the destination airport or train station to a meeting or hotel). Gray Dawes’ Bishop says one is harder than the other to manage as part of a wider business travel journey.
“For the first mile, people ring their local cab company because they know they’re super reliable and if there’s a problem there, there’s someone there to deal with it versus a supplier you’re not familiar with. Normally it’s the first product you consume on a trip but it’s pretty much always the last one that you book,” says Bishop.
He adds: “The last mile is easier because you know if you’re getting off a flight in San Francisco and New York at a peak time, you know trying to get an Uber is not always easy. There is a comfort factor for seeing someone there with a board with your name on to take you those last miles.”
The benefits for corporates of using specialist providers are threefold, says Price. The first is bringing ground transport spend under management, putting an end to the huge volume of different receipts handed in by travellers.
Duty of care is the second pillar, with companies now able to track their travellers even better and tell when they have been dropped off at an airport or hotel.
But the third pillar, and perhaps the biggest prize, is carbon reporting, which is expected to become a much bigger need for corporates.
Mobility IQ’s Stuart Donnelly says, “Carbon emissions are front and centre, particularly with the [European Union’s] Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive announced in January and which will be effective from the beginning of 2025 but will be based on 2024 data.”
Getting ground transport properly managed may soon not be a nice-to-have but a must-have.
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