Uber’s Business Service Tightens the Rules

Ride-sharing mobile app Uber only recently launched its B2B service for corporate travelers last July. Already, however, the company is making adjustments to its business operations.

The company announced in a blog post Wednesday (March 11) that it would tighten the rules of its corporate travel services in efforts to give travel managers more control and reduce inappropriate use of the service among employees.

The post, titled “Uber for Business: These Rules Aren’t Made To Be Broken,” revealed that the Uber for Business dashboard would now allow company administrators to customize their corporate policy and dictate the day, time and location of pre-approved travel arrangements made for employees.

Those settings, Uber said, will then automatically be applied to the mobile app when used by an employee. While the company noted that corporate travel managers have always been able to control these settings, the addition allows customized settings to ensure corporate compliance before a trip actually takes place.

In beta testing of the new service, Uber said that nearly every tester used the new customization tools. One of those testers, Jarrod Jordan, Vice President at Thuzio, said that the new features allowed his company “to ensure trips with Uber are always in policy, leaving us the valuable time to focus our resources and energy on our talent and clients instead of tedious travel compliance.”

One of the top challenges for corporate travel managers, Uber said, is compliance with travel policy among employees. The app’s new business service means managers no longer have to waste time flagging expense reports or enduring a complicated reimbursement process, because all trips made under the customized business policy are pre-approved.

Uber for Business rolled out across the U.S. and Canada, and later the U.K. and France, last summer. Months later, the company unveiled its corporate billing system across dozens of countries to minimize the need to file separate expense reports, the company said.

Mobile applications within the corporate travel and expense management industry have been rising in popularity. In just the last few weeks, two T&E management services revealed their own mobile apps with similar goals to streamline and digitize the expense reporting process.