MOBILITY
CONNECTING THE DOTS
Securing visibility and control of ground transport spend is a legacy problem to which a raft of emerging tech players are aiming to bring order
By Mark Frary (published 27 July 2023)
When you have a mature air programme and hotels are under control, what next for a travel manager?
Daniel Price, CEO of Jyrney, may have the answer. “We speak to a lot of corporates and they tell us that of their total travel spend up to 20 per cent of it can be ground transportation,” he says.
The problem for corporates is that only a tiny proportion of it goes through their travel management company. There is also the question of volume.
“When you look at ground transportation, it might be 15 per cent of the spend but probably accounts for more than 40 per cent of the transaction volume,” said Stuart Donnelly of The Miles Consultancy, the company behind the Mobility IQ sustainable mobility app, launched earlier this year.
“Unlike air and hotels, where there is a high level of compliance to policy, supplier, mode and class of travel in advance of booking time, when it comes to ground transport there is almost no control.”
Mobility IQ’s route planning and booking tool is offered direct to corporates and connects content from a range of ground transport suppliers, such as car rental, carshare, ride hailing, public transport and micromobility options such as e-scooters. Mobility IQ’s model is based on a monthly user fee for unlimited usage rather than a transaction fee.
All over the place
Fragmentation is an issue. If you thought air and hotel content were fragmented, just think about ground transportation. One estimate puts the number of taxi companies in the UK at just over 37,000. Some will be large companies with large fleets but others could be single vehicle operators. How on earth is a corporate expected to deal with that?
Despite the large number of taxi companies, many of these use the same dispatch systems. Jyrney connects to the small number of these systems to gain access to hundreds or thousands of vehicles. Added to this are connections to the larger, global operators such as Carey and Bolt.
CMAC is another company that integrates with the taxi dispatch systems to offer ground transport at scale. CMAC handles time-critical ground transport services for companies such as airlines and train operators to corporations and breakdown companies. It transports almost two million passengers every year.
"We work with pretty much every taxi company in the UK and we're expanding rapidly now across Europe," says Neil Micklethwaite, CMAC’s chief operating officer.
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.
Where the rubber meets the road
How global reinsurance company SCOR streamlined its car programme
Until last year, global reinsurance company SCOR's mobility requirements were met by "expensive" local taxi agreements which employees could use as and when required on airport runs and in key cities including London, Paris and Dublin.
But as the company's global travel and expense manager, Roberta Iorizzo, explains, those agreements "not only proved to be cost ineffective, but also involved varying admin processes and were difficult for SCOR employees to use, especially when accessing the platform from different locations". The result, says Iorizzo, was an adverse affect on employee engagement.
She adds: "Because our internal processes required input from numerous teams in different locations, this was a lengthy and expensive process for employees and admin teams within the business. What we needed was to globalise our mobility options."
A new solution was required – one that would streamline processes, increase visibility of spend, help reduce the company's carbon footprint and deliver a reliable service. "Our frequent travellers are often the revenue-making employees and any service that can facilitate their job is a help to the business growth," says Iorizzo.
After a "rigorous selection process", SCOR appointed FREENOW to manage its mobility needs, starting in May 2022 in the UK, Ireland, France, Italy and Germany.
SCOR integrated the FREENOW for Business platform with its existing expense platform, SAP Concur, so users no longer need to manually enter their expense claims. "Trip details and receipts are automatically sent to the Concur expense module, ready to be claimed and sent for approval by the manager," says Iorizzo. "The whole experience... is now easy and transparent and saves employees and business travel admins within the company large amounts of administrative work."
With one of the key objectives achieved, where else has SCOR seen improvements? Savings were "not the driving force behind this implementation", explains Iorizzo, who says FREENOW is not cheaper than other providers, but that "it’s more the comfort of having a safe, reliable method of transportation at your fingertips and the smooth end-to-end process from booking to reimbursement."
Lastly, SCOR is also benefitting from CO2 tracking and reporting and access to the largest electric vehicle fleet in EMEA, enabling the company to pursue new sustainability objectives.
The outcome of all the above? Employee adoption has tripled in the last year and more than 240 SCOR employees are now booking through the platform.
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