Fixed Fare Corporate Taxi Booking with No Surge Pricing

## How is the fixed fare calculated before booking? When a staff traveller opens the CabsOn corporate app, or when a booker uses the business portal to arrange transport, we build the fare from three inputs: the driving route between origin and destination, the vehicle class selected (saloon, executive estate, MPV, or eight-seater), and the standard time-of-day tariff for that vehicle class. There is no fourth demand multiplier in the formula. The route is calculated using live UK mapping data so diversions or planned works are already factored in before the fare is quoted. We display the total fare on the confirmation screen before the booker confirms. Once confirmed, that number is saved on the booking record inside the portal and is what the driver, the dispatcher, the traveller receipt, and the finance system all reference. If the same route is booked again the following week at the same time, the fare will be identical — that is the point of the model. Fixed fare pricing works because we operate on a published rate card, not a demand curve. Our drivers are paid from the same rate card. That means we do not have any commercial pressure to raise prices when it is busy, because our costs do not rise when it is busy in the same way that pure marketplace models do. Predictability is designed in at the operations level, not just at the customer-facing checkout screen. ## Does the fare change during peak hours, bad weather, or delays? No. The fare quoted on the booking screen is the fare that appears on the invoice, and we do not apply peak-hour multipliers at any tier of the corporate product. Friday evenings in Manchester at 5pm are the same price as Tuesday morning at 10am. Christmas Eve, New Year's Eve, football finals, national rail strikes, and heavy rain are priced at the same base rate. The commercial risk that traffic and demand fluctuation creates sits with us as the operator, not with your budget forecast. The single exception is a per-minute wait charge for pickups where the traveller keeps the driver waiting significantly beyond the included allowance on the account. That wait rate is itself fixed and published on your account rate card, so even the exception is predictable and forecastable. If a flight lands late and the traveller comes out later than expected, the included wait allowance re-baselines to the actual landing time from live flight tracking — we do not charge for delay that is outside your traveller's control. ## Which journeys qualify for fixed fare pricing? Three journey types are quoted and locked as fixed fares on every corporate account: - Airport transfers to and from any UK airport we serve, including Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, Luton, London City, Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol, Liverpool, Leeds Bradford, Newcastle, Edinburgh, and Glasgow. - City-to-city runs between major English and Scottish cities — for example a London-to-Manchester executive transfer, or a Birmingham-to-Cambridge run for a corporate event. - Pre-booked local trips inside cities where we operate a licensed fleet, when the booking is made at least an hour ahead of the pickup time. For same-day on-demand bookings — a traveller opening the app and pressing book now — we use our standard published local tariff. That tariff is also stable throughout the day. We do not run surge multipliers on ASAP requests either. So while an on-demand booking is not technically a locked quote in the same way a scheduled booking is, the price is drawn from a rate card that does not move with demand. ## How does fixed fare pricing help our finance and travel teams? Predictable ground-transport spend changes how a finance team plans. Once a route has a fixed price, the finance lead can multiply that price by expected journey volume for the month and get a genuine forecast, not a range. When prices are dynamic — as they are on standard rideshare corporate accounts — that forecast is a rough estimate, and cost centres get billed for demand-side variance they had no control over on the day. Inside the business portal we surface this benefit through the Budgets area, where a travel manager can set monthly caps per department or per project and see live utilisation against those caps. Because the fares are stable, the utilisation percentage is meaningful. A department that has used 80 percent of its transport budget by mid-month actually has 20 percent left, rather than 20 percent at today's rates that could quietly become 15 percent by Friday. Cost-centre allocation on the Departments page and named-traveller assignment on the Team page inherit the same predictability. For a travel manager, quoting is a genuine quote. If a recruitment agency is pricing a candidate visit itinerary, or an event planner is scoping a two-day conference with airport transfers for forty delegates, they can bring the numbers to a client as commitments, not estimates. The predictability compounds up the stack from a single ride to a full monthly programme. ## What happens if the route changes mid-trip? If a traveller decides mid-journey to add a stop, drop off a colleague, or change the destination, the booking is re-priced at trip end using the same static rate card that produced the original fixed fare. The added segment is priced at the published per-mile or per-minute rate for the selected vehicle class — no surge multiplier applies to add-ons either. The traveller sees the adjustment on the digital receipt with a plain-English reason attached (for example "second drop added at King's Cross"), and the booker sees it on the booking detail page in the portal alongside the original quote. If the driver takes a longer route because of a road closure, a lane restriction, or a diversion outside the traveller's control, we absorb that cost. The fixed fare quoted at booking is what appears on the invoice line. The commercial risk of unexpected route length sits with us. ## How does this compare with Uber for Business and Bolt Business? Honest comparison: Uber for Business and Bolt Business both show an upfront fare on request in most UK cities, so at a per-ride level the traveller does see a price before confirming. The difference is that their upfront price already includes any surge multiplier active at that moment — a booking made at 5pm on a Friday in central London will typically be quoted at 1.4x to 2.0x the same route at 11am on a Wednesday. For a corporate account trying to forecast monthly spend against a fixed budget, that variance is real and unpredictable at the finance-team level, even if the individual traveller sees a clean number. Addison Lee, like CabsOn, publishes a stable rate card and does not apply surge multipliers, but their coverage is heavier in London and thinner in secondary UK cities. If your travel programme is London-only and price-insensitive at the executive tier, Addison Lee is a serious alternative and we would say so plainly. Where CabsOn is stronger: our national coverage is denser than Addison Lee across the Midlands, the North West, Yorkshire, and Scotland, and we run the same fixed fare policy across that whole footprint at consistent pricing. Where the rideshare-model alternatives are stronger: raw driver density in central London at 8am on a weekday, and app fluency for occasional travellers who already use Uber or Bolt personally. We would rather be transparent about that trade-off than oversell. ## How does the fixed fare appear on the monthly VAT invoice? Every ride is itemised on your monthly PDF invoice, which we issue on the 1st of the following calendar month covering all rides in the previous calendar month. Each line shows the journey date, the traveller name, the from-to route, the cost centre or department if one was allocated, the net fare, VAT at 20 percent, and the gross total. The line-level fare is the same number that was locked in at the point of booking — so a booker who approved a 68.50 pound airport run on the 14th will see 68.50 pounds on the invoice as the 14th's line item. Invoices are downloadable from the Invoices page in the business portal in both PDF and CSV formats, and we can email them automatically to your accounting inbox on the 1st of each month. If you use a purchase order model, PO numbers captured against the booking are printed on the invoice line for HMRC-compliant reconciliation. ## What if the airport flight is delayed on arrival? For airport pickups, we track the flight number the traveller or booker enters at the time of booking. If the flight lands late, the driver's arrival window shifts automatically and the included wait time re-baselines to the actual landing time. There is no charge for the airline's delay, and no adjustment to the fixed fare on the invoice. The fixed fare quoted at booking is still exactly the fare that appears on the monthly statement. If the traveller is significantly delayed clearing customs beyond the included post-landing wait, the excess wait is billed at the published per-minute rate on your account rate card — which, like the base fare, does not surge and does not vary by time of day.