Is it just me, but the headline itself just underlies Ubers business model - business travellers are not avoiding taxis. They are taking taxis from an unlicensed taxi firm.
I once had a taxi driver berate me at the end of a journey for not taking a long enough trip in from the airport. It was a 25 minute journey, Google says at the moment the same trip is 20 minutes and a trip to the center of the same city is 24 minutes. So the "most common trip for a tourist from the airport" would have been a few minutes longer given the same traffic and this guy thought it was appropriate to berate me for not living further out (the taxi lobby has been one of the groups blocking a train in from the airport too). I somehow doubt an Uber driver would have been giving me the same gratuitous negativity.
Also, Uber now can automatically forward receipts to Concur for expense reporting if you set it up.
For the honest people who don't follow the time-honored process of using taxi receipts to bury personal expenses, it's way easier to do your expense report when Uber helps fill it out for you.
> Is it just me, but the headline itself just underlies Ubers business model - business travellers are not avoiding taxis. They are taking taxis from an unlicensed taxi firm.
I'm about to travel for business to where taxis only take cash; I don't care at all if Uber is licensed or not, I'm using them.
Wow, downthread I got my first death threat / trolling.
Nothing to do with you, but it is interesting just how polarising Uber is. Like you said "you don't care if they are licensed". Well then that is a debate to have (somehow) in each city. Not to ignore the law and do it anyway.
I can well believe that most taxis in most cities can be beaten by a well trained monkey with a scooter. But doing so by breaking the law is not acceptable. Any business fight that starts by breaking the law is just heading down the road to actual real crime. In London a cab company with many of the qualities esposed by Uber is doing quite well (Addison Lee) and even opening up in NYC. And not pretending they are a lift sharing company.
There are very good valid reasons for opposing bad law. A shiny new business model is not one of them.
The shininess of the new business model is evidence that the existing regulatory structure is broken and ought to be changed, but in absence of a large, growing, profitable company, who would be pressing for the change? The power would all be concentrated in the existing industry. Only because Uber has sidestepped taxi regulation have they grown powerful enough that fixing the law has become a possibility. If they had tried to do things "the right way" they would never have gotten anywhere.
But there are large powerful companies who have managed to grow and deliver Uber like services (credit cards, online booking etc) without sidestepping regulations (cf Addison Lee)
If the argument is "licensing taxis costs so much that all the profit is driven out, and we have to avoid licensing in order to make our profits" then surely small inefficient taxis would make even less profit than giant, well funded, efficient companies like Uber? So I think the argument is dubious.
I will happily admit I don't know enough about the details of Ubers practises, and would be interested in knowing more, such as driver and car checks, fleet numbers during different times of day / week, variations across cities etc.
You raise a good point. I strongly suspect that Certify, like other expense SaaS providers, almost certainly skews to smaller companies and possibly to tech companies. Expense reporting at larger firms is typically tied into things like Oracle Business Suite--i.e. internal.
Given that, I suspect that some amount of trending toward Uber from traditional taxis is real but that this data probably exaggerates it.
17 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 62.6 ms ] threadWhy?
For the honest people who don't follow the time-honored process of using taxi receipts to bury personal expenses, it's way easier to do your expense report when Uber helps fill it out for you.
I'm about to travel for business to where taxis only take cash; I don't care at all if Uber is licensed or not, I'm using them.
Nothing to do with you, but it is interesting just how polarising Uber is. Like you said "you don't care if they are licensed". Well then that is a debate to have (somehow) in each city. Not to ignore the law and do it anyway.
I can well believe that most taxis in most cities can be beaten by a well trained monkey with a scooter. But doing so by breaking the law is not acceptable. Any business fight that starts by breaking the law is just heading down the road to actual real crime. In London a cab company with many of the qualities esposed by Uber is doing quite well (Addison Lee) and even opening up in NYC. And not pretending they are a lift sharing company.
There are very good valid reasons for opposing bad law. A shiny new business model is not one of them.
If the argument is "licensing taxis costs so much that all the profit is driven out, and we have to avoid licensing in order to make our profits" then surely small inefficient taxis would make even less profit than giant, well funded, efficient companies like Uber? So I think the argument is dubious.
I will happily admit I don't know enough about the details of Ubers practises, and would be interested in knowing more, such as driver and car checks, fleet numbers during different times of day / week, variations across cities etc.
Dunno whether BuzzFeed is still blacklisted by pg, so haven't bothered submitting anything in ages.
Given that, I suspect that some amount of trending toward Uber from traditional taxis is real but that this data probably exaggerates it.