covid: deliveries
Deliverance! How home deliveries have become a lockdown lifeline for customers and taxi operators Mark Bursa
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s one door closes, another opens. Coronavirus has hit the taxi sector as hard as any. For many operators, the collapse in business was instant and precipitous. With the country in lockdown and travel at a minimum, many private hire fleets were faced with an existential crisis: it really was adapt or die.
For many companies, including some of the UK’s biggest fleets, the solution has been to diversify into the delivery market. To switch from carrying people to carrying goods – everything from parcels to food to pharmaceuticals. And for some companies, that diversification has left them with a successful and growing new business division. Regardless of Covid-19, home deliveries
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have been growing rapidly in the past few years. All the major supermarket chains offer home deliveries, while restaurants and takeaways have been able to access home deliveries through the arrival of national chains such as Deliveroo, Just Eat and, inevitably, Uber Eats. These services have been enabled by the same app-driven geolocation technology that powers ride-hailing apps,
David Richmond
so Uber’s presence is not surprising. And other big brands are looking at the sector too, including Easy (as in EasyJet), which is trialling an EasyFood service in Leicester. But that technology is now easy for anyone to access – it is part of the offerings of both the leading dispatch systems suppliers, Autocab and iCabbi, and this has allowed the taxi and private hire sector to make its own plays into this growing sector. And taking a locally-focused approach can allow taxi fleets offer a service that can gives restaurants and customers a better deal. Nottingham’s DG Cars was quick to get on board with food deliveries in the early stages of the pandemic, initially offering basic deliveries of £15 food boxes containing staples such as bread and milk in partnership with a local convenience store. “We did it free of charge, not for publicity,” says DG Cars’ operations
