Abellio plans to expand Catalina-based managed taxi service following successful Welsh launch

Transport giant Abellio is planning to expand its managed taxi service following a successful launch on a major train crew contract with Transport for Wales. The system, which uses Catalina Software, has been running for several months without missing a single pick-up, according to David Bloomfield, taxi contract & operations manager for Abellio Rail Replacement.

“It’s been very stable since the day it went live, and the team really likes using it,” Bloomfield added. “Our plan is to use Travel Connect brand to offer managed travel solutions to anyone that wants them. We started in rail as that’s what we know, but work with any sector.” This could include airlines, cruise lines, and even other rail companies.

Abellio Rail Replacement had been using buses and coaches to move passengers when rail services were disrupted, but had been using third-party suppliers when it needed to use taxis for train breakdowns, disrupted or disabled passengers and train crew movements across its five rail operations in the UK. But the Transport for Wales tender meant it had to offer a managed taxi service as part of the tender. “We decided it was time to branch out into taxis – so we could do everything from 1 to 10,000 seats. It was a glaring gap in our offering,” said Bloomfield.

So after talking to a number of suppliers, Abellio selected Catalina’s Freedom software to set up its own managed taxi service. Bloomfield said Abellio chose Catalina as the software was already proven in this type of application, and it offered the freedom to decide exactly how it wanted to run the new business.

Despite lockdown restrictions, Catalina installed the system and trained Abellio’s nine newly recruited employees, all remotely.

The Transport for Wales rail replacement contract, means Abellio had to manage 400 taxi bookings over the first weekend and 4,000 in the first month, with not one taxi wrongly booked or late. Already more than 200 taxi operators – many of them smaller companies – have signed up for the system, and some are reporting they are doing several hundred jobs a month.

Abellio also has seven train operating businesses in the UK, and it plans to use the system to transport its own train crews from job to job in different locations, or between home and work at the start and end of shifts – usually early in the morning or late at night.

Catalina founder Graeme Whiting said: “This is probably the most innovative application of our Freedom system as there were no legacy systems or existing processes to configure it around.”

The Freedom system interfaces easily via API with almost all taxi dispatch systems, so operators using any software can access the work that Abellio has on offer. The system also offers a ‘mini Freedom’ dispatch system and a direct-to-driver app.

“When a job is allocated it is either sent out via an API interface to the taxi company’s dispatch system or sent out as an email confirmation. Drivers can see the job details via the Freedom mobile app,” says Whiting.

Bloomfield added: “The beauty of working with Catalina was that they had done something similar before, so their system was tried and tested. If we’d taken a different path there would have been question marks about whether it would work on day one. I didn’t have any of those concerns.”