Travel agencies.
Book ground for your clients without becoming the supplier. Commission, confidentiality and a booking that takes seconds.
For travel agenciesFor corporations
Your travel policy,applied at booking.
Ground transport for in-house travel programmes. Rules before the spend, rather than an argument after it.
- Policy enforced when the booking is made
- Live journey visibility for your risk team
- One coded invoice, in your accounting currency
Policy that does not rely on goodwill.
Class limits, spend thresholds and approval routing are applied when the booking is made. Nobody has to remember the rule, and nobody has to enforce it afterwards over email.
Answers before the incident, not after.
Named chauffeur, licensed operator, known vehicle, tracked journey. When your security team asks where someone is, there is an answer rather than a card statement.
The saving is mostly not the fare.
It is expense processing, tax you could not reclaim on missing receipts, and out-of-programme rides bought at whatever the app charged that night. Those are the numbers a pilot exposes.
What is a corporate chauffeur programme?
A corporate chauffeur programme is an arrangement under which a company's ground transport is booked through one contracted supplier, under the company's own travel policy, with central payment and reporting. It covers employee airport travel, meetings, client hosting, roadshows and late-night journeys across every market the company operates in.
It differs from a taxi or ride-hailing arrangement in three ways that matter to the organisation rather than the traveller: the price is fixed and known before the journey, the booking can be constrained by policy at the point it is made, and the company can see the journey while it is happening. Those three properties are what turn ground transport from an expense category into a managed programme.
Seven people have to be happy.
Ground transport programmes stall because they are sold to one of these and inherited by the other six. Each of them wants something different from the same contract.
| Who | What they actually want | What they get |
|---|---|---|
| Travel manager | Fewer supplier relationships and fewer questions | One agreement covering 1,200 cities, one place to look |
| Finance | Coded spend and recoverable tax | One invoice, itemised by cost centre, in your accounting currency |
| Procurement | No lock-in, benchmarkable rates, clean due diligence | No minimum spend, written rates, a full supplier pack |
| Security and risk | To know where people are, in advance | Named chauffeur, vetted operator, live tracking, escalation route |
| Executive assistants | To book in seconds and change without friction | Arranger permissions, saved profiles, one number that answers |
| Sustainability lead | Data they can put in a report | Electric class where markets support it, written emissions summary |
| The traveller | The car to be there, and no expense claim | Fixed price, named chauffeur, nothing to pay or file |
If you are building the internal case, the two hardest to convince are usually procurement and finance, and both respond to the same thing: a short pilot with real data rather than a proposal with modelled savings.
Designing the policy.
These are the levers available and the settings most programmes land on. All of them can differ by traveller group, by market, or by both.
| Lever | Common setting | Why programmes choose it |
|---|---|---|
| Vehicle class by purpose | Business as default, First for client-facing travel | Ties the upgrade to the occasion rather than the job title |
| Vehicle class by seniority | Applied to a named group rather than a grade | Avoids encoding your org chart into a supplier's system |
| Class by journey length | First permitted above three hours | Long routes are where cabin quality genuinely changes the arrival |
| Airport travel | Pre-booked only, no reimbursed kerbside hire | This is where most leakage and most duty-of-care risk sits |
| Late-night travel | Pre-booked car mandated after a set hour | Usually a safety commitment rather than a cost decision |
| Hourly hire | Approval required above a set number of hours | Hourly is right for some days and expensive for others |
| Spend threshold | Route for approval above a per-journey figure | Catches the outliers without slowing the routine ninety percent |
| Lead time | Encouraged rather than enforced | Hard lead-time rules push people straight back to an app |
| Out-of-policy bookings | Allowed with a reason code, reported monthly | Blocking outright drives leakage; visibility fixes more than refusal |
The rides you cannot see.
Almost every corporate ground programme has the same problem, and it rarely appears in the supplier review. A meaningful share of journeys never touch the programme at all: an app booked at the kerb, a hotel car charged to a room, a taxi paid in cash and claimed as a round number.
Those rides are the expensive ones. They carry surge pricing, no negotiated rate, no cost centre, unrecoverable tax and zero duty-of-care visibility. They are also invisible until someone reconciles expense claims against programme spend, which is precisely the exercise a pilot makes possible.
Where the money actually goes.
Six places, and only one of them is the fare. We will not put a percentage on any of these, because the honest number is whatever your own pilot data shows.
| Where cost leaks | Usual cause | What the programme changes |
|---|---|---|
| Surge exposure | Rides bought on demand at peak times | Fixed prices agreed at booking, unaffected by demand |
| Out-of-programme rides | Convenience at the kerb, no booking channel to hand | App and portal booking that is faster than the alternative |
| Expense processing | A finance cost per claim, on every claim | No claim at all; one reconciliation per period |
| Unrecoverable tax | Missing or non-compliant per-ride receipts | One compliant invoice per period, per entity |
| Wrong vehicle class | No guidance at the point of booking | Policy defaults, with upgrades tied to purpose |
| Duplicate and no-show bookings | Several people booking around one movement | Arranger visibility, shared bookings, free cancellation |
The pattern we see most often: the fare is broadly comparable, and the programme wins on everything that surrounds it. If a supplier is promising a large headline saving on fares alone, ask where it is coming from, because it is usually coming out of the operator.
What implementation looks like.
Six weeks from first conversation to a reviewed invoice, and the pilot group can be booking in the first fortnight.
1
Week one, the shape.
Traveller count, markets, current suppliers, what your policy already says and where it is being ignored. Enough to configure an account rather than to write a proposal.
2
Week two, configuration.
Cost centre structure, policy rules, approval routing, invoicing entity and currency, set up with your finance and travel teams rather than left for you to assemble.
3
Week two, a pilot group.
One department, one region, or the executive team. Twenty to fifty travellers is enough to produce data you can argue from, and small enough that nothing is at risk.
4
Weeks three and four, rollout.
Remaining travellers added by upload, invitation or single sign-on. Arrangers trained in about twenty minutes, because there is very little to learn.
5
Week five, integration.
Where it applies: your travel management company, the API, single sign-on, and scheduled reporting into whoever needs it. Optional, and not on the critical path.
6
Week six, the first review.
The first invoice, the first reporting pack, and an honest conversation about what the data says. Including the parts that argue for changing the policy rather than the supplier.
What corporate accounts get used for.
Airport travel is the volume. The rest is where the programme earns its reputation internally.
Employee airport travel
The largest category in almost every programme, and the one with the clearest duty-of-care argument. Flight-tracked, pre-booked, with 60 minutes of free waiting from actual landing. Airport transfers.
Client collection and hosting
The first thing a visiting client experiences of your company is the car. Usually the one place a policy permits First class without argument, because the audience is not your own employee.
Executive and board travel
Discretion, consistency and the same standard in every market. Assistants book on behalf, keep the confirmation, and change it without a conversation. Hourly hire for full days.
Late-night and lone travel
Many organisations mandate a pre-booked car after a set hour or for employees travelling alone. The named chauffeur and the tracked journey are the reason, not the comfort.
Roadshows and regional days
Multi-city sequences where a missed connection costs a meeting rather than an hour. Run as a programme with a coordinator. Events and roadshows.
Relocation and onboarding
New joiners, visiting family, temporary accommodation. Low volume, high visibility, and the sort of thing people remember about how a company treated them.
Conferences and offsites
Arrival peaks that no amount of individual booking handles well. Quoted as a vehicle plan with an on-site coordinator above eleven vehicles.
Accessibility requirements
Recorded on the traveller profile so the right vehicle and assistance are assigned every time, rather than being re-explained on every booking.
What your risk team will ask.
Three questions, usually in this order. Who is driving, and how do you know? Every chauffeur drives for a licensed operator whose operating licence, commercial insurance and vehicle registrations we verify before that operator receives any bookings, and whose chauffeurs hold the correct local permits and background clearances.
Where is the traveller right now? Active journeys are visible in real time to the roles you authorise, and access is role-based rather than open to the whole account. And who do we call at two in the morning? Dispatch, on a number that reaches a person who can see the vehicle's location while they are speaking to you.
For your procurement process.
What we can supply, and roughly when. Ask for all of it at once rather than in sequence; it is quicker for everybody.
| What you need | What we provide | Timing |
|---|---|---|
| Insurance evidence | Certificates of commercial insurance, per operator and per market | On request |
| Operator licensing | Evidence of operating licences held by the operators serving your markets | On request |
| Security questionnaire | Completed responses to your own vendor questionnaire | Within your stated deadline |
| Data protection terms | Contractual data terms alongside the published privacy policy | With the agreement |
| Sample invoice | A worked example against your own cost centre structure | Before you sign anything |
| Reference calls | Existing clients of comparable size, where they consent | On request |
| Service levels | Written commitments on response, escalation and reporting | In the agreement |
| A pilot | A live group producing real data before any commitment | Within two weeks |
There is no minimum spend and no lock-in contract, which removes most of the reason to run a long RFP. If your process requires one, we will complete it properly, but a two-week pilot answers more questions than a hundred-page response.
Reporting your ground emissions.
Ground transport is a small line in most corporate travel footprints and an awkward one, because the data usually arrives as expense claims with no distance, no vehicle type and no way to calculate anything from it.
A programme fixes the data problem first. Every journey has a known distance, a known vehicle class and a known powertrain, so a written summary of ground transport emissions can be produced for the period using published emission factors. Electric class is available wherever the local market supports it, and can be set as your policy default in those markets.
Corporate programme questions.
To start a pilot or ask something not covered here, write to reserve@rydes.co or call +1 888 881 7933.
What is a corporate chauffeur programme?
A corporate chauffeur programme is an arrangement under which a company's ground transport is booked through one contracted supplier, under the company's own travel policy, with central payment and reporting. It covers employee airport travel, meetings, client hosting, roadshows and late-night journeys across every market the company operates in. The price is fixed before the journey, the booking can be constrained by policy at the point it is made, and the company can see the journey while it is happening.
How long does implementation take?
About six weeks from first conversation to a reviewed first invoice, with a pilot group booking inside the first fortnight. Configuration takes a week, rollout two to three, and integration with a travel management company or API sits outside the critical path. Nothing prevents travellers booking while the later stages are still being set up.
Can we run a pilot before committing?
Yes, and we would prefer it. One department, one region or the executive team, typically twenty to fifty travellers, live within two weeks. Because there is no minimum spend and no lock-in contract, a pilot costs you nothing beyond the rides themselves and produces data you can take to finance and procurement.
How is our travel policy applied?
At the point of booking rather than afterwards. Limits by vehicle class, route, spend or seniority can be set, and bookings outside them can be blocked or routed to a named approver. Rules can differ by traveller group, by market or by both, and they are configured with you rather than chosen from a fixed list.
What happens when someone books outside policy?
Whatever you decide. The usual configuration allows the booking with a reason code and reports it monthly, because blocking outright tends to push people back to a ride-hailing app where you have no visibility at all. Hard blocks and approval routing are both available where a category genuinely warrants them.
Who can see traveller tracking data?
Only the roles you authorise. Access is role-based rather than open to everyone on the account, so a travel manager, a security lead and an executive assistant can each be given a different scope. Traveller data is shared with the local operator only to the extent needed to complete a journey.
What do you provide for our procurement process?
Certificates of commercial insurance and evidence of operator licensing per market, completed responses to your own security questionnaire, contractual data protection terms, a sample invoice worked against your cost centre structure, reference calls with clients of comparable size where they consent, and written service levels. Ask for all of it at once rather than in sequence.
Do you support multiple legal entities?
Yes. Separate invoicing entities and currencies can sit within one programme, reported together or separately as you prefer. This is normal for groups operating across several jurisdictions and does not require separate accounts or separate agreements.
How do you handle higher-risk markets?
The same verification applies everywhere: licensed operator, correct local permits, background clearances, named chauffeur, tracked journey. Where a market or a traveller warrants more, enhanced vetting and security-cleared chauffeurs can be arranged, though these take weeks to put in place rather than days and should be raised early.
Can we mandate pre-booked cars for late-night travel?
Yes, and many programmes do. A rule can require a pre-booked vehicle after a set hour, or for employees travelling alone, or in specified markets. It is usually adopted as a safety commitment rather than a cost measure, and it is one of the easier internal cases to make.
What sustainability reporting do you provide?
A written summary of ground transport emissions for the period, calculated from the known distance, vehicle class and powertrain of each journey using published emission factors. That is possible because programme data carries the underlying detail, which expense claims do not. Electric class is available wherever the local market supports it and can be set as your policy default in those markets.
How do we benchmark your rates?
Ask for quotes on your ten highest-volume routes and compare them against what you paid for the same journeys last quarter. That is a more useful test than a rate card, because it captures surge exposure and vehicle class drift, which are where the real difference usually sits. We will provide the quotes without requiring an account.
What happens if an operator underperforms?
Operator performance is reviewed continuously against completion, punctuality and rider feedback, and operators who slip stop receiving work. On a managed account, incidents affecting your travellers are escalated to your account manager and reported to you rather than absorbed quietly.
Can executives have different rules from everyone else?
Yes. Policy is applied to named traveller groups rather than to grades, which lets you give the board or a client-facing team different defaults without publishing your org chart into a supplier system. Assistants can be authorised to book for specific individuals with their own permissions.
Does it cover relocation and onboarding travel?
Yes, and it is a small category worth setting up deliberately. New joiners, visiting family and temporary accommodation runs are low volume and high visibility, and they tend to be remembered. They sit on the same account with their own cost centre.
How do we measure whether the programme worked?
Compare programme spend against expense claims for the same category before and after, which exposes leakage; compare fares on your highest-volume routes; and count the finance hours spent processing ground transport claims. The first and third are usually where the case is won, and both are visible within a quarter.
Elsewhere in business.
Same platform, different relationship to the traveller.
Hotels and resorts.
A car in 1,200 cities for your concierge, billed to the property or the room, without holding a fleet.
For hotels and resorts
Events and roadshows.
Conferences, offsites and multi-city roadshows, run as one programme on the same account and the same invoice.
Event transportStart with fifty travellers.
Two weeks of real data will tell you more about your ground spend than any proposal we could write.