Traveling has never been easier. People can access rich online repositories of knowledge about destinations and use a number of apps and websites to compare hotels and flights. However, according to ride services marketplace Jayride, travelers may be left stranded when they go online to seek door-to-door ride services options. “We aim to empower the world traveler with best local ride service to meet their needs—no matter where on Earth their travel takes them,” explains Rod Bishop, co-founder and Managing Director, Jayride.
Headquartered in Sydney, Australia, Jayride enables travelers to find and book ride services—including airport transfers, ride shares, sedans, and limousines—worldwide.
Jayride serves 1,500+ airports in 100+ countries, representing 85% plus of the world’s airfares, and supports more than 3,400 transport companies. The business serves 500,000 passenger trips per year—a number that has approximately doubled every year since its foundation in 2012.
“We enable transport companies to secure distribution to leading travel brands such as Expedia and Skyscanner, in many cases enabling them to expand from local to global operations overnight,” explains Bishop. “We also give travelers the ability to find, compare, and book the best local ride services available worldwide.
“We want travelers to trust Jayride to always provide the best ride options for them, whether to a beach resort in Bali or to a mountain in Colorado in the United States.”
Best-in-class maps
Jayride turned immediately to the cloud and the best-in-class maps service to support its model. The business is using Places API from Google Maps Platform to return location information to travelers, with Place Autocomplete automatically completing place names as users type.
Jayride also uses Directions API to calculate optimal directions between two locations and support its pricing model, and Google Maps to display maps of interest to travelers and transport companies.
However, the business soon realized that it needed powerful data processing and analytics to pursue its ambition of becoming the world’s largest aggregator of data about door-to-door ride services, provider of the most relevant information about transport options for travelers, and host of the most insightful user reviews of ride services.
“As we take our business global, it’s not enough for us to say we cover 1,500 airports if we only provide access to ride services to and from the airport to downtown locations,” explains Bishop. “We need to understand precisely where a traveler needs to go and how—for example, whether they need a five-seat vehicle to transport themselves and fellow travelers 50 miles from an airport to a specific resort or street address.”
