Yesterday at the Business Travel Show, Olympia, ground transportation disrupter Uber announced its long-expected offering for UK corporate travel buyers. From our discussion with Uber’s head of corporate sales at the exhibition stand, this first move is a damp squib.
Point one – don’t look for corporate discounts. This offering is about providing a level of account management and MI at a premium, not a discount.
Point two – there is no suggestion at the moment of any enhancement of Uber’s business model to provide comfort to corporate buyers who are mindful of their duty of care to their employees.
The offering may have some attraction to businesses who are already reimbursing significant amounts to their travellers who are making bookings on Uber. If your business is one of these, setting up a corporate account with Uber may make (limited) good sense. With the kind of control information that the monthly invoice and MI from Uber could give you, then you will be readily able to assess the costs and risks that using Uber carries; and assess accurately the costs and benefits of switching that use to a black cab service or private hires. Getting at that information easily may be worth the money. (Better still, implement a good expenses management system to capture all your T&E information.)
But the overriding factor remains duty of care. It’s not just Uber of course: the same issue applies to any service in the so-called “sharing economy”, so Uber lookalikes and other services like private accommodation matching service Airbnb fall into the same area of concern.
Put simply, if you take service from a provider that has regulatory authorisation – PCO licensed black cabs; hotels and apartments that are local authority registered – then you have assurance that you are meeting your duty to provide a safe working environment for your employees. Allowing employees to use private drivers/vehicles for their transport or private rooms for a stay gives no such assurance. The lower costs may seem attractive, but when the driver has an accident and is subsequently shown to have a dubious history; or when a fire or carbon monoxide incident arises in the private apartment, the apparent cost saving could prove a very false economy.
There is no evidence that Uber, Airbnb and the others really want corporate business, as they have plenty to go at in the B2C market. But if they ever get serious about a corporate offering, then it will need to come with a system and process of inspection and qualification that provides corporate buyers with at least as good a duty of care assurance as the public licensing bodies currently provide in respect of black cabs and registered hotels.