The Business Travel Magazine Oct/Nov 2019

Ground transport / Tech & tools
Bringing it all
TOGETHER
Ground transport is at the forefront of the on-demand trend, but
TMCs are still battling to adapt. Linda Fox looks at progress so far
One of the biggest behavioural
shifts in recent years is the
move to on-demand services
that fulfil a range of needs, be that
music consumption, transportation,
food delivery or many more.
The incredible rise of services such as
Lyft and Uber were only the start of
disruption in the ground transportation
space and many more developments, from
new entrants to mergers and acquisitions,
have followed.
In recent months alone, trend-setting
Uber has acquired Careem, the United
Arab Emirates-based ride-hailing service,
for just over $3billion. Another demonstration
of how seriously the sector is
being taken is the acquisition of travel
management technology platform Deem
by car hire giant Enterprise back in January
this year.
As exciting as these developments are,
they create challenges for travel managers
and their TMC partners.
Vicki Williams, Director of Sales and
Implementation at Click Travel, says:
“When it comes to integration, the fast rise
of suppliers such as Uber means they have
a tendency towards focusing on the needs
of B2C channels first.
“This has made seamless integration
more challenging in a B2B environment,
as the user experience around policy,
reporting and duty of care can become
compromised if not contained within one
single platform, for all travel types.
“For example, the ability to have full
integration, with a perfect payment
process, remains our strategy, rather than
just a link to a 3rd party website. We
develop our own technology, so we are
When it comes to
integration, the fast
rise of suppliers such as Uber
means they have a tendency
towards focusing on the
needs of B2C channels first”
60 THEBUSINESSTRAVELMAG.com