Feast or famine?

We all understand the old adage, ‘feast or famine’. Well, this perfectly summarises the biggest challenge for operators of private hire fleets – either too many jobs to cover or not enough.

Of course, this brings logistical problems – the need to balance the number of available drivers with the number of customers, quite tricky, as managers are only directly in control of their staff levels.
So, instead of turning away passengers when demand is great and all cars are working, wouldn’t it be a good idea to be able to send them a taxi anyway?

Alamein, one of the leading names in mobile technology for the private hire sector, has devised a package that will help to overcome these difficulties. Director, Aston Clarke, explained: “Rarely do operators find they have an equal volume of available work to match spare capacity and they do not want to incur increased overheads to cater for that ’just in case’ scenario.
“To overcome this, we believe that by joining forces with other operators in the vicinity, they can service the needs of their customers – but without compromising their own client base. This is where ‘Fleet Connect’ comes in. With our integrated tracking and messaging systems installed in many fleets this enables the ability to automatically share jobs – therefore more efficiently meet demand by utilising other operator’s spare capacity and improve customer service levels.
“Fleet Connect gives a secure link and provides the relevant pieces of information without compromising confidentiality, including requests to other operators, acknowledged receipt of the job, transmission of the booking to be fulfilled, confirmation that passenger is on board and journey completed. All of this is achieved in one seamless solution.”

Aston went on to say that with ‘Fleet Connect’, Alamein is simply facilitating sharing between fleets by connecting them together and that individual operators remain in control, each dictating their own levels of sharing and information.
“It makes sense for operators to do what they can to maintain market share and meet the needs of customers. In this economic climate it’s ridiculous to turn business away!”