Breaking ground on the ground: innovating the professional driver industry

Jens Wohltorf, CEO and Co-founder, Blacklane

Legacy limousine services have done a dual disservice to customers. First, they have wasted time and money. Providers charge expensive rates and add opaque surcharges. Also, booking processes favor them over customers. For example, requiring a full day’s notice over the phone to cancel a ride. Second, traditional chauffeur companies have rarely innovated -- and then only after new entrants challenged them.

Case in point: fewer than one in five U.S. travelers use an app or supplier website to book a ride from a professional driver service. Most often they call, according to Phocuswright data. The tools simply have not existed to easily book rides in advance around the world. Therefore, chauffeured transportation is a decade or more behind other travel and tourism industries. Flights, hotels and activities can be booked in minutes. The first and last miles of travelers’ journeys, however, take far longer with legacy players.

A customer-focused professional driver service must fix these issues. Customers should be able to book and cancel rides on a website and apps. Passengers should be able to contact drivers directly. Drivers should wait an hour at all airport pickups. Prices should be all-inclusive and transparent.

And rates should be closer to taxi fares than legacy limousine prices. Once these elements are in place, the professional driver industry can expand far beyond its current market. There is no reason, for instance, why it can’t serve more suburban-to-urban rides and challenge some train and short-haul flight routes. A door-to-door service for several people costs less and saves time for distances up to a couple of hundred kilometers.

A professional driver can take multiple passengers from A to B in a single fare. This would eliminate the need to travel to an airport, wait an hour, fly for an hour, and then take a vehicle to the final destination. These options are coming as travelers seek new mobility services. The professional driver industry is no longer parked in the past. There’s a huge opportunity for those who can modernize the industry and offer passengers and drivers a new road ahead. To hear more about this topic, join me at 17:45 on 20 September in Hamburg at the European Networking Group’s MOVE 2016 summit. I look forward to seeing you there.