After beating the packaging drum for more than a year, Jay Walker’s Upside Travel is now also offering flights and hotels individually. It added Uber as a packaging option and will soon announce new support services. TMC relationships have not advanced, but Walker reiterated during a Thursday interview that they’re part of the plan. Upside publicized the new… Read More »
American Express Global Business Travel will use ground transportation platform Mozio to offer clients a range of options through an agent portal, the KDS booking tool and the GBT mobile app. Mozio also works with Carlson Wagonlit Travel, which owns a piece of the five-year-old marketplace of roughly 3,000 transport providers. Inventory includes public transit systems, black cars and… Read More »
Sometimes the things we write about peter out. Sometimes more developments happen, but they don’t warrant an entirely new article. In other cases, something unexpected or counterintuitive is noteworthy in its continuance. Hence, the Updates post. Click to jump to United’s self-service portal enhancements, the next step for an emerging college-level corporate travel education program, Advito’s expanding collaboration… Read More »
[UPDATE, April 18, 2017: Uber for Business now lets users request and pay for rides for others. The account is centrally billed. Uber business clients access the “Central” service dashboard via tablet or computer. They can request multiple rides for fellow employees, customers or others. Those riders do not need to use the Uber app or have their… Read More »
[UPDATE, March 28, 2017: Uber restarted self-driving car operations in Pittsburgh, San Francisco and Tempe, Ariz., according to published reports. An Uber official told Reuters that the company completed an investigation into the Arizona crash and cleared the autonomous driving technology.] [UPDATE, March 27, 2017: After a self-driving Uber car crashed in Arizona a few days ago, the… Read More »
[UPDATE, Jan. 27, 2017: Dav El BostonCoach parent Marcou Transportation Group acquired GroundLink and LimoAnywhere. “These companies provide us the opportunity to directly compete” with Uber, Lyft and other so-called transportation network companies, according to a statement from Marcou CEO Scott Solombrino. He noted that implementing auto-dispatch and “geospatial pricing” capabilities will help Marcou offer “the industry’s first… Read More »
Uber and Lyft mastered the technology to make the on-demand car experience simple and nearly immediate. Traditional black car operators are trying to do the same. But their world is a complicated patchwork of platforms, patents and partnerships. No initiative has unified the industry, and more pop up all the time. Sorting out on-demand capabilities means aggregating supply… Read More »
On-demand ground transportation company Lyft is gaining momentum in corporate travel and is open to negotiated benefits based on volume. Sources said the company is proving easier to work with than bigger rival Uber. Uber declined to comment on whether it works with negotiated benefits. Its website indicates it does not offer corporate discounts. “We’re taking a different… Read More »
As they work for advantage, clients, suppliers and those in between keep business travel management interesting. Changes to underlying and consumer-facing technology make it a dynamic business function. The personal and geopolitical elements of business travel offer points of note from the micro to macro levels. As one of our featured practitioners noted, this job is about economics, geography, psychology and then some. And so last… Read More »
At a limo conference in Atlantic City last fall, a couple of entrepreneurs announced the ground transport platform to compete with Uber. Seconds later, a black car exec whispered, “We’re building one, too.” This week it was déjà vu as The Company Dime looked into announcements about two other similar initiatives. Evidence of a third turned up, then a fourth. Shouldn’t the car… Read More »