Erin Galey has grown so accustomed to using Uber on business trips that it is hard to imagine using a taxi. “I don’t know the taxis, but I know Uber, and I’m comfortable with it,” she said. “If I call a taxi, I’m not sure what I’m going to get.”
Ms. Galey, a producer and filmmaker from Portland, Ore., said that her Uber trips, which can cost more than taxis, were justified by quick pickups, clean cars and drivers who knew their way around. “It’s more expensive, but I also feel like I’m getting more for it,” she said.
She is one of the many business travelers shifting away from traditional car services and taxis. And companies, after initially resisting, are adapting to the change.
In a member survey of global travel buyers conducted by the Association of Corporate Travel Executives via email last month, roughly 20 percent of the respondents said they allowed their business travelers to use ride-hailing services like Uber, and about the same proportion said they were considering it.
“Companies need to take a look because their travelers are asking for them,” said Greeley Koch, the association’s executive director. “What I would bet you over the next 12 months is a lot of those no’s will be looking at these programs even more.”
Nearly a third of rides that business travelers expense are for ride-hailing services, up from just over 10 percent a year ago, according to Certify, a company that makes travel expense management software. Most are for Uber; a small number are for Lyft.
”When you look at the actual spend for Uber, it continues to grow,” said Certify’s founder and chief executive, Bob Neveu. “My expectation is that the trend is going to continue.”
Just as technology managers had to accede to employees’ demands to use iPhones years ago, they now have little choice about ride-hailing services, experts say.
“Whether it’s added formally or not added, people are using Uber,” said April Bridgeman, managing director for the travel management consulting company Advito. “They’re using it already.”
Michael Shulman, an investment adviser, said he preferred ride-hailing services to taxis when traveling. “My first instinct or first reflex when I need a car is to do Uber or to do Lyft,” he said. He called the services “more efficient” and said he liked not having to carry cash or save receipts.
Ride-hailing services are responding to the increased demand by making their offerings more friendly to managed travel programs. Lyft for Work, which was started in November, lets a company distribute ride credits to employees, clients or job candidates.
Uber for Business, introduced in July, captures travelers’ trip and payment details for inclusion in their employer’s managed travel system. In an email, Uber described the response as “overwhelmingly positive.”
This month, Uber added new functions that allow travel managers to set time and location parameters for which rides are approved. The company said those features were intended to help managers enforce compliance with company policies.
Morgan Stanley, for example, added Uber to its travel policy last year, and it said it now had tens of thousands of Uber for Business accounts.
All this is coming at the expense of traditional taxis. Certify found that taxi rides as a percentage of total rides fell by 16 percentage points in only a year. Taxis now make up less than half of rides that employees expense.
“We’re really seeing a shift,” said Barry Padgett, chief product officer for Concur, a travel expense management company that teamed up with Uber on its Uber for Business service. From 2013 to 2014, Concur observed a ninefold increase in the use of Uber by corporate travel clients. “People are recognizing and sharing there’s a better way to book ground transport,” he said.
Ride-hailing apps offer two advantages for travel managers, Mr. Padgett said. It is quicker and easier to reconcile an Uber payment than a scribbled-on taxi receipt with a charge on a corporate card. Uber also helps managers see exactly where their people are going, information that cannot be captured when a passenger hops in a cab. “The quality of the data is incredibly, incredibly high,” he said.
Madlyn Caliri, director of global procurement for Reed Elsevier, said ride-hailing apps offered the promise of being able to standardize and improve on both the rider’s experience and the data available to travel managers. “Realistically, if we’re looking at it as a substitute for taxis, we don’t have that now,” she said. “They’re almost held to a higher standard for what they’re replacing.”
Ms. Caliri said that her company did not have a policy regarding ride-sharing but that it would most likely examine making one. “I think it’s on the list for us to look at later this year,” she said.
In the meantime, business travelers are voting with their wallets — or phones.
David Rennyson, chief revenue officer for the technology company MicroStrategy, is on the road about every other week and does not see himself going back to taxis.
“If it’s a city like San Francisco or Washington, D.C., or New York, where I know there’s a high density of Uber traffic,” he said, “it’s pretty much an exclusive for me at this point.”
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