GroundLink CEO Liz Carisone on Competitive Pricing

• New pricing structure
• Competion with ridesharing
• Improving time management in ground transportation
• Better data for buyers

In the year since Liz Carisone became CEO of black car service GroundLink, she's introduced new pricing structures and enhanced reporting and trip control. She also told BTN transportation editor Michael B. Baker the company is using its distribution reach to position itself against ridesharing providers.

BTN: The bottom line is a big driver for travel buyers. What's up with GroundLink's pricing structures?

Carisone: Corporate customers are telling us what they don't like about certain carriers is pricing transparency. We have worked hard on a model that builds in complete pricing transparency. We are also very clear on any surge practices that we have. We trialed a new pricing plan in the New York marketplace in February and got very good results. We're going to be analyzing those results. If they're good for the consumer, that's one of our key stakeholders, but our drivers are also key stakeholders, so we have to make sure that higher utilization offsets lower apportionment of earnings. If that's the case, we'll definitely look to re-implement it.

We're not UberX, but we have the same platforms and technology capabilities, especially in the New York marketplace with Ride Now capabilities. We have benchmarked and tracked ourselves and in our top 20 markets are extremely competitive to an UberBlack product, at a price point that is lower than, say, a BostonCoach. If a customer is looking for BostonCoach, they can get everything that they need from a technology platform without the price tag. We're finding that, especially in New York, we've been able to make some inroads into some key accounts, and our pricing methodology and platform are working very well.

BTN: Are there any other ways you can reduce costs for travel buyers?

Carisone: We are trying to figure out a way that when you know you're going to be delayed, if you can message us, we can then push your ride ahead 30 to 45 minutes. Our average lead time in New York is about 20 minutes and anywhere outside of the New York marketspace is anywhere up to about 60 minutes. So if you wanted to push your ride by 60 minutes, push a button, that gives us an "edit your ride" feature and we manage that.

BTN: Do you monitor passengers' flights, as well?

Carisone: We actually use flight tracking, so we will know your flight is either early or late and adjust your pickup time accordingly. We have a standard wait time policy. On domestic flights, your first 30 minutes is free. That usually gives passengers enough time to get their bags and get out to the car without incurring wait times. On international flights, it's an hour. A lot of times, our corporate customers need to be able to take a shower or make phone calls before they leave the airport, so they'll do a set-aside time for 45 minutes. Let's say you're in a foreign country and you know it's going to take you longer, so you can always add time to give you that breather space, and you won't incur any wait time. We just need to be able to do better so when you're coming out of a restaurant or leaving a business meeting, you don't have to worry about incurring it on point-to-point pickups.

BTN: What about making travel managers' lives easier? You expect to go live with Concur's e-receipts platform this year. What else?

Carisone: We have a corporate dashboard, which is a great selling feature, and we have specific admin privileges that we've placed into the system to prevent any unauthorized use or viewing of other customers within your account's data. If you are the admin for the CEO, no one will be able to see where the CEO is or what the CEO's accounts look like. These are the kind of privileges and gating we've put into the system to allow travel managers to be able to see all of their information but only travel arrangers to see specific information. With the corporate dashboard being able to track your rides, pull your invoices and things like that, we've also added management information features. On request, we can build you a full report based on customer parameters, point-to-point parameters, etc. We'll show you where you're spending your money. It will detail out whether you have a lot of stops, whether there have been a lot of events or out-of-town travelers, whether there are individuals who are not following policy. That's been extraordinarily helpful and has helped to build relationships with our customers and grow our business.

BTN: How is ridesharing affecting GroundLink?

Carisone: Thirty percent of our business is outside [New York], so we use a large affiliate network that's all connected for ride-tracking capability as well as messaging, so you know who your driver is. Because of that, we have grown dramatically outside of the New York marketplace year over year, and we're up again [so far] this year. GroundLink actually had the first mobile app, probably, in New York. We launched on the BlackBerry in 2009 and on the iPhone in 2011. We were definitely early adopters to the ride-now concept. We just didn't do a good job of getting the investor backing to be a household name right now.

BTN: What about Deem's plans for an on-demand mobile platform?

Carisone: The real challenge for our industry is that there are several different platforms. The good thing about Uber is they've been able to attract a lot of supply, which drives demand, and they can balance out the demand/supply quotient because of their investor backing. For companies like us that don’t have that luxury, in order to pull together and support one another either when we're overbooked or underbooked, we need to communicate across different platforms. We are building APIs to be able to do that so we can connect to others and we can really help each other to deliver quality service in an on-demand world. What Deem is trying to do is be a front end and a back end, and that's probably much more difficult: to get established companies to move off of their own platforms into a common platform.