Twenty past ten and the pre-books are late
The pattern is familiar. The pubs and restaurants start emptying, the phone and app fill up with people wanting a car now, and every driver who comes clear is given the next on-demand job nearby. Meanwhile, the jobs booked days ago, the couple going to the station for the last train and the account customer's late meeting pickup, come round on the screen at their time and there is nobody free within miles.
The controller pulls a driver off the queue, or begs one to take the job after their current fare. The pre-booked customer, who did everything right by booking in advance, waits longest. Some ring to ask where their car is. Some ring another firm.
Why pre-books lose out
Dispatch systems are good at matching the nearest free car to the job in front of them. On a busy night that logic favours whatever is waiting now, and it does not plan ahead for jobs that are due in twenty minutes.
- Pre-booked jobs are released to dispatch at a fixed time before pickup, often too late when drivers are all tied up.
- No capacity is held back in the areas where pre-books are due.
- Call handlers accepting on-demand work cannot see how many pre-books are due in the next hour.
- Long journeys taken on demand, such as a fare to another town, remove a car for much longer than the controller expects.
- Airport and account pre-books, the most valuable work, get the same treatment as a short local hop.
Most dispatch systems have settings that help, such as advance release times and priority for booked work. They are often left at their defaults because nobody has had time to tune them against your own busy-night patterns.
Two kinds of customer, both disappointed
| Pre-booked customer | On-demand customer | |
|---|---|---|
| What they expect | The car at the time they booked | A reasonable wait quoted honestly |
| What goes wrong | Car arrives late or not at all | Quoted a short wait, then waits much longer |
| What it costs you | Trust, repeat bookings and account work | Cancellations and bad reviews |
| Who takes the call | Controller, at the busiest time | Call handler, repeatedly |
Account and airport customers are the ones you can least afford to let down, and they are the most likely to be pre-booked.
A lookahead that protects the booked work
What we build works alongside your dispatch system, using its data and, where it allows, its settings.
- We start with your own past busy nights: when pre-books fell late, how long on-demand jobs in each area took, and how many cars were really free.
- A rolling lookahead shows, for each area, the pre-booked jobs due in the coming period and the drivers likely to be clear in time to reach them.
- Where the lookahead shows a shortfall, pre-booked jobs are released to drivers earlier, and account and airport work is given priority according to rules you set.
- Call handlers and your booking app see a live indication of the realistic wait for on-demand work in each area, so quotes are honest.
- When capacity is fully committed, the tool advises the office to pause or limit on-demand acceptance in that area, and the decision stays with the controller.
- After each busy night, a short report shows which pre-books ran late and why, so the rules can be adjusted.
Where your dispatch system allows changes to release times and priorities through its settings or API, we adjust them there rather than building a second dispatch.
Busy nights, pre-books on time
Controllers see trouble coming. If a cluster of station runs is due at quarter to eleven and every car in that area will be on a job, it shows up earlier in the evening, while there is still time to bring a driver across from a quieter area.
Call handlers stop promising five minutes when it will be thirty. On-demand customers get an honest wait, and fewer of them cancel after booking.
Your best work, the airport runs and the account customers, becomes the most reliable part of the night rather than the part that suffers most.
Is this your Friday night?
- Pre-booked customers ring asking where their car is.
- Controllers pull drivers off the queue to cover booked jobs.
- Call handlers quote waits that turn out far too short.
- Your dispatch settings have never been reviewed against your busy nights.
- Account and airport jobs run late on the same nights every week.