Book a taxi for a guest, billed to your business account

How does guest booking work end to end? A booker signed into business.cabson.uk opens the Book a Ride page and switches the passenger toggle from "Staff member" to "Guest". They enter the guest's full name and UK mobile number, the pickup address, the destination, the pickup time (now, or scheduled up to 90 days ahead), and optionally a reference — a PO number, candidate ID, hotel room number, or client account code — plus the department or cost centre to bill against. On submit, three things happen. The ride is dispatched to a nearby driver, exactly as it would be for a staff ride. The booker receives an on-screen confirmation with a live tracking link. And the guest receives an SMS from our UK long code that reads roughly: "Hi Sarah, your CabsOn taxi is booked for 14:30. Driver: John Miller, silver Ford Mondeo, LK21 XYZ. Track: cabson.uk/t/abc123. Reply STOP to opt out." A second SMS is sent when the driver is 200 metres away. The guest can reply to the SMS. Replies route back to the booker's email and to the SupportChat inbox in the portal, so if the guest needs to change the pickup door or ask a question, a human on your side sees it. ## What information does the guest actually receive? The SMS contains the driver's first name and surname, the vehicle make, model and colour, the full UK number plate, the pickup time and address, a tracking link that opens a map in the guest's browser (no app install), and a phone number they can call to reach the driver. That is deliberately the minimum needed to recognise the car — we do not include booking references or account numbers the guest does not need to see. If the pickup is more than an hour away, a reminder SMS goes out sixty minutes before pickup. If the driver is delayed, an update SMS goes out with the new ETA. If the ride is cancelled by the booker, a cancellation SMS confirms it so the guest is not left waiting. ## Who is guest booking designed for? Four groups use it most, based on the account activity we see. Hotels use it for airport transfers, station pickups and restaurant runs for patrons where the concierge desk books on the guest's behalf and the hotel absorbs the cost or bills it to the room. Recruitment agencies use it to move candidates between interview sites, between an interview and a train station, or from a hotel to a candidate day — the agency pays, not the candidate. Sales and business-development teams use it to send a taxi to a visiting client's hotel and get them to the office, which is a much better first impression than a link to a rideshare app. Event planners use it in batches, booking 20 to 60 arrivals for a single evening function, with each guest getting their own SMS and each ride billed to the event's cost centre. Legal firms, accountancies and film production companies also use it for visiting counsel, expert witnesses and crew — anyone who is not on the corporate payroll but needs to move on the company's account. ## How is a guest ride invoiced? Every guest ride appears on the same monthly consolidated invoice as your staff rides. On the first working day of each month, we generate a single PDF invoice covering every completed ride in the previous calendar month, itemised with pickup and drop-off, passenger name (staff name or guest name), department or cost centre, PO reference, fare net of VAT, VAT at the UK standard rate of 20 percent, and gross total. The invoice is a full VAT invoice suitable for HMRC input-tax reclaim on business travel. The PDF is available in the Invoices page of the portal from the moment it is generated, and is also emailed to any addresses you configure — typically an accounts-payable inbox. Payment terms are 30 days from invoice date once your account is approved for credit, though you can opt to pay by card on file if you prefer. A CSV export of the same data is available from the Reports page and contains additional operational fields (driver ID, vehicle registration, duration, distance) which most expense-management platforms need to auto-categorise the spend against a general ledger code. ## Can I control which guest bookings go through and which need approval? Yes. The same spend controls that apply to staff bookings apply to guest bookings. Under Departments you can define cost centres — Sales, Recruitment, Front Office, Event 2026-Q3, or whatever your reporting lines are — and under Budgets you can set a monthly cap per department. When a booker creates a guest ride that would exceed the department's remaining cap, or that costs more than a threshold you set for individual rides, the booking routes to the department owner for approval before dispatch. Approvals arrive by email and appear in the Approvals page of the portal. The department owner can approve, reject, or approve-with-note in one click. In practice, most guest bookings never trigger approval — a routine airport transfer is well under any sensible per-ride cap — but the workflow is there for the outlier journeys where finance wants a second pair of eyes. ## How does guest booking compare with using Uber for Business or Bolt Business? Honest comparison: Uber for Business and Bolt Business both offer guest booking, and both do it well in cities where their driver supply is deepest. What they do better than we do is global coverage — if you need to book a ride for a guest in Berlin or Sao Paulo, Uber for Business is the right choice. What we do better is the SMS experience, the invoicing and the UK-market focus. Uber's guest flow assumes the guest can install an app or click a web link — we send a plain SMS with vehicle details, which works on every phone including a business hotel's shared handset or a candidate's basic feature phone. Our invoice is one PDF per month with UK VAT itemised per ride and PO numbers per line, matching how UK finance teams actually process supplier invoices — Uber's monthly summary needs a separate reconciliation step against individual card charges for many customers. And we operate on English regulatory ground with UK-licensed drivers and UK-plated vehicles, which matters for procurement teams whose duty-of-care policy requires a Home Office-licensed provider. If your organisation is UK-headquartered and books 80 percent or more of its guest rides in England, we are usually the better fit. If you are global, use both — we can plug into an existing corporate travel policy alongside a global provider. ## What data does the corporate reporting include for guest rides? The Reports page distinguishes guest rides from staff rides so you can see, for any period, total spend on guests versus staff, spend by department, spend by cost centre, and spend by individual booker. For recruitment agencies this often reveals which recruiter is running up the highest candidate-travel bill; for hotels it shows how much the concierge desk is spending per month on airport runs; for sales teams it maps rides against the client accounts they were booked for. Every report is exportable to CSV and to PDF, and can be scheduled to arrive by email weekly or monthly. The Reports data feed is also available via our API for customers on the higher-tier plans who want to pull ride data directly into their internal BI tools. ## What if we book a guest ride and the guest never turns up? The driver waits five minutes free of charge from the scheduled pickup time, calls the number on the SMS, and if there is still no response, contacts our dispatch team who message the booker via the portal. You decide whether to extend the wait, cancel, or redirect the ride to a different address. Waiting-time charges above the free five minutes are billed at a per-minute rate, itemised on the invoice, so a booker who over-books can see exactly what happened. We do not charge no-show fees separately — waiting time and the minimum fare for a dispatched ride cover it, and everything appears transparently on the monthly invoice. ## Is there a limit on how many guest rides we can book? No. There is no per-account cap on guest bookings, no minimum monthly commitment, and no per-SMS charge for guest confirmations. If you book 3 guest rides in a month or 3,000, the feature works the same way and appears on the same monthly invoice. Larger accounts — typically those booking more than 200 guest rides a month — are assigned a dedicated account manager and can negotiate bespoke SLAs on driver arrival times for their most time-sensitive routes.