Uber Continues To Dominate Taxis For The Business Trip

The ridesharing space continues to hit new milestones in the corporate travel space, with businesses choosing to spend their money on these services as opposed to traditional taxis.

In its Q3 report, travel and expense management firm Certify found that Uber and Lyft together accounted for the majority of corporate spend on ground transportation, showing that on-demand ridesharing services have now surpassed traditional taxis in popularity for business travelers. According to the company, Q3 marks the first time that this has happened.

Meanwhile, taxis continue to lose market share, dropping 2 percent to holding 12 percent of ground transportation transactions in the quarter. Similarly, car rental services saw a decline in their share of the business traveler market by 1 percent this quarter.

Uber is especially popular in San Francisco, Atlanta and Boston, in which the ride-hailing app accounts for 73.7 percent or more of the business ground travel transactions.

“Of all the disruptive technologies to come out of the sharing economy over the past several years, nothing has captured the interest of businesspeople or captured more headlines in the media than Uber and global rise of ride-hailing,” said Certify CEO Robert Neveu in a statement. “Tracking at 52 percent of the ground transportation total in the third quarter, it’s remarkable to see that ride-hailing is now more frequently expensed by business travelers than taxi and car rental combined, and more popular than taxi at anytime during the three years Certify has been reporting on this data.”

The report noted, however, that car rental transactions are typically less frequent, considering a professional would make a single purchase for multiple rides with the car. The report also focused on transaction frequency, not value, for these services.

Uber’s popularity among business travelers coincides with its launch of Uber for Business, a feature in the app that allows professionals to more easily toggle between their personal and corporate cards and automate expense data from their Uber trips into their expense reporting services.