Concur Partners For Clients To Charge Cab Fare By Phone

Expense and booking technology company Concur earlier this month announced a partnership with automated ground transportation payment firm RideCharge to allow customers to charge taxi and sedan rides through mobile phones and have the charges uploaded directly into Concur's expense tools.

The program is available in 18 cities, including New York City, Chicago and Washington, D.C., to any Concur Expense user, Concur Cliqbook online booking customer or user licensing directly with RideCharge. There is a charge for RideCharge customers, but none for Concur's. Travel management companies that offer Concur's tools also will offer it this month. By year-end, the technology should be in more than 50 cities, officials said.

"You have a $30 billion cash business with very few receipts," said Tom DePasquale, executive vice president of technology for Concur, adding that the average travel report contains 3.5 taxi receipts.

"It cracked what we viewed as the last big area of travel expense that didn't have electronic receipts or electronic management," he said.

According to RideCharge president Sanders Partee, "It's bringing taxi and other capabilities to what you would like to do with airlines."

Concur customers can launch a ground transportation search from Cliqbook and send an itinerary to RideCharge, which will offer different transportation selections, Partee said. Customers can choose from taxis, sedans, chauffeured limousines and shared ride services. RideCharge also can set parameters based on a corporation's needs, like limiting employees to certain levels of ground transportation service.

"Concur knows your office location, they know where your home is," Partee said. "All this information is already known to the system, which makes it so much smarter."

The customer inputs a phone number into the system so RideCharge has it on file. Once a method of transportation is selected, RideCharge inputs the information into the ground transportation company's electronic dispatch system. A notification and an estimated arrival time is sent to the customer when the vehicle is dispatched.

Once the trip is complete, travelers call RideCharge from the mobile phone. The system recognizes the phone number, the customer completes payment via the phone and information is sent to Concur's expense system.

"It is using deployed technology already in the hands of users, and in cabs and sedans, versus a hardware-based solution," said Concur's DePasquale. RideCharge does not require any additional equipment in vehicles and works on any mobile phone.

"This is fundamentally different from what the first-generation tools did," DePasquale said. "There is no voucher. There is no prepayment."