How Gett Is Rethinking the Corporate Ground Transportation Experience

This sponsored content was created in collaboration with a Skift partner.

Corporate ground transportation has typically been a cumbersome and clunky realm. It’s a sector within the travel industry that’s far less understood than others, and until very recently, has been occupied by a number of disparate, outdated providers that had little to no continuity beyond city and country borders. And while major ride-hailing apps have shifted the sector, they haven’t solved these challenges.

With antiquated booking systems, limited vehicle options, and expensive services from legacy providers — as well as a rise in unmanaged bookings due to self-service apps — this space was nothing short of a fragmented ecosystem, doing little to help any duty of care requirements that companies may owe to their employees or enhance the overall booking experience.

Then, London-based ground transportation aggregator Gett stepped up to the plate, and has since become a leading ground transportation spend management platform and B2B marketplace in the corporate ground travel sector worldwide.

Connecting customers with a global grid of corporate fleet, ride-hailing, taxi, and limo providers via a fully digitized app experience, Gett manages the entire booking and spend process for over one thousand fleets and serves over a quarter of the Fortune 500.

Gett gives corporate customers more power to choose the rides they need, through an advanced, efficient booking platform and user experience. Its services help meet the needs of both today’s busy and frequent business travelers and the corporate travel managers who oversee their trips. The result is the opportunity for significant cost savings for companies due to the range of vendor options and ability to better control unmanaged travel.

A More Streamlined Experience

“Essentially we’re like a GDS: a distributor of ground content,” said Paul Grant, Gett’s global head of enterprise sales. “No one has ever really properly taken on that challenge, certainly not from a technology point of view.” As well as taking on that challenge, Gett aims to deliver on experience — something that’s not always been done in the corporate ground transportation space.

Grant continued, “We only work with suppliers through a connected way via tech. We integrate with fleets throughout the world, which means the user experience is more streamlined wherever you go. The cars might be different, but we strive to make the look, feel, and experience the same.”

Analytics and Tracking for Added Safety and Control

Gett’s data-driven GTM aggregator and optimization platform helps corporate and business buyers gain an upper hand on their spend by providing them with helpful data and analytics.

“We can provide data and analytics on local markets. For example, our data can show if the landscape is changing, or if one provider has an advantage over another,” said Grant. “We’re almost consultative, because we’re neutral. We’re here to present what the market looks like and what the options are. We provide choices.”

Additionally, the fact that rides are trackable on Gett means that companies are able to better fulfill any duty of care remits they may have to their travelers. “That’s probably more powerful than anything,” Grant said. “The fact that a corporate travel manager can know that their employee got picked up at the airport at the right time and was then dropped off at their hotel as scheduled is invaluable.”

Corporate Manager-Minded

With its roots in the UK taxi industry, Gett originally started out as a ride-hailing service (it still is in Israel and Russia, and continues to have a line of black cabs in London). So while its GTM platform itself is relatively new to the market, it’s based on decades of on-the-ground and corporate work expertise.

“We understand how corporate travel managers work and think, so we built a tool that allows them to filter and get the most value of the information we provide,” added Grant.

For example, Gett is able to discern different employee allowances and offer rides based on their company status. “We have a very big in-built travel policy engine within our product that can regulate certain levels of car allowed: on level, on cost, on eco — eco is really high up for us,” added Grant.

Increasingly Eco-Minded

A recent report published by the UK Department for Transport in August 2021 indicated that post-pandemic, UK corporate travel may well be less frequent across the board, but a larger percentage of business trips are expected to use private cars and taxis as the main mode of transport compared to pre-pandemic. While we believe this shift in UK corporate travel is generally due to the sweeping changes being made in how businesses operate following the pandemic, climate change may also be a widening concern.

“We are noticing that many companies — especially big enterprises — are shifting their practices on the back of the recent IPCC climate change report,” said Grant. “Net-zero pledging is becoming more popular, and we’ve seen that buyers really care about this. We can help them achieve some of their environmental targets, and we know that getting that eco part right is super important.”

Impressively, Grant explained that Gett can go as far to steer travelers away from taking rides that might not be necessary. “If the ride is short — half a mile or so, for example — a company can elect to send a notification that will appear encouraging the traveler to walk for health and environmental reasons.

Ultimately, Gett’s model approaches the sector in a unique way. This once cumbersome and fragmented sector finally has a strong player to unify and transport it to new ground.

This content was created collaboratively by Gett and Skift’s branded content studio, SkiftX.