A local taxi firm with an app, a corporate portal and flight monitoring on six airports

The operation

Bracknell Taxi covers Bracknell and the surrounding Berkshire towns around the clock, with regular routes out to Ascot, Windsor, Reading, Guildford, Basingstoke, London, Southampton and Bournemouth, and airport work into Heathrow, Gatwick, Luton, Stansted, London City and Southend.

This is a local firm competing on the same terms as national app operators, and the customer expectation has moved accordingly. People now expect to book from a phone, see where the car is, and know the price before they commit — and a firm that cannot offer that loses the under-40 market regardless of how good its drivers are.

At the same time the business depends on business travel and account work, which needs the opposite of a consumer app: named account users, agreed rates, and consolidated invoicing rather than card payment per trip. Serving both from one operation is where a lot of local firms end up running two incompatible processes.

What TBMS provides

Booking runs through three channels into one system — a mobile app, the website and the phone — so a customer chooses the route that suits them and the office sees a single job list. Instant online quotes with no hidden fees mean the price is settled before the booking is confirmed, on every channel.

Real-time GPS tracking covers the "where is my car" question that drives most of the calls into a local office, and gives the operator the visibility to allocate the nearest suitable vehicle rather than the one that answers first.

Business customers get a separate corporate login portal alongside standard passenger registration, so account users book against their company's agreed terms and the work bills on account. Flight monitoring adjusts airport pickup times using real-time flight data across all six airports, which is what makes 24/7 airport coverage viable for a firm of this size.

What they use