Jens Wohltorf, chief and co-founder of the professional chauffeur service shares what it means to be connected

Connected travellers are those connected to a brand at any given moment. It’s not about demographics or devices, but rather about their engagement. They could connect to a brand (or multiple brands) online during the booking process or physically when they are using the service. The connection could be direct via our site or app, or indirect through a corporate booking portal or online travel agency.

What we have learnt is that no matter how travellers come to us, we need to provide information quickly and consistently, and meet their service expectations. So the travel industry needs to think of all travellers as ‘connected’ and in order to do this, we need to market to and respond to travellers on any device and platform, directly and through partners, based on their preferences.

A practical example is providing customer service over Facebook and Twitter, in addition to the phone and email.

Connecting through partnerships

For us in the professional driver market, we realise that we need to identify new partnerships to further connect with travellers. Of course, we invest heavily in our website and app, and on rides. But new partnerships will allow us to augment another travel providers’ service and extend our value through the travel ecosystem.

One example of this is our partnership with Lufthansa. We are the airline’s professional driver service of choice, giving the carrier the ability to extend its high-level of service to the road, and providing a new channel of Lufthansa’s website to book a Blacklane ride.

Aside from Lufthansa, this year Amadeus and Concur a have all come on board with us and there are more partnerships to come. We believe that partnerships allow us to connect with customers through new platforms and websites and in doing so we build trust and brand awareness over the long term.

Expansion has been key to this and geographically, we have added 36 cities in North America. This gives us 36 new locations to serve our customers, and increases awareness with travellers from those cities.

Hurdles to overcome

For new markets, education is often the biggest hurdle. Travellers may not know of the packages and deals available with new tour sites, for instance, and most of our new business and personal customers tell us they’re surprised how competitive our rates are.

The long-term issue is integration. However, we envisage a day when a traveller simply has to enter a meeting in a calendar, and then a travel system builds a complete itinerary, or several where the traveller can pick one – in a matter of seconds. This will require integration among calendar software, traveller profile information and corporate booking systems.

Going forward, what we’d like to see is the travel chain completely closed. So, in other words, the customer will be able to book their flight, hotel and professional driver service together at a confirmed price. This will be possible in any language and in any city. Behind the scenes, travel and calendar providers are also building an integrated system to automate travel bookings as mentioned above so customers simply enter a meeting date and time, and the system does the rest.

Jens Wohltorf is CEO and co-founder of the professional chauffeur service Blacklane. He will be speaking at EyeforTravel’s Connected Traveller event 22-23 October 2015 alongside numerous other leading industry executives