The popular ride-share app Lyft has announced that it has struck up a partnership with Carlson Wagonlit.
The travel management company, which is the first of its kind to partner with Lyft, says that the Uber rival has entered into a "preferred partnership" with them to specifically cater to their business customers.
“We are excited about our new Lyft partnership and are focused on delivering best-in-class services for our travelers to reach their destinations in a safe and convenient way," says Jim Hartnett, vice president of global supplier management for Carlson Wagonlit Travel.
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“At Lyft, we’re committed to improving people’s lives with the world’s best transportation, and working with Carlson Wagonlit Travel to move business travelers in a safe, easy, and affordable way is a natural next step for our work in this space," adds Amit Patel, director of business development for Lyft Business.
Lyft, which is currently available to 95% of the United States population and is available in most airports, seems to be taking direct aim at the embattled Uber, who recently announced that they've got a partnership with Volvo and Daimler for self-driving vehicles.
This "preferred partnership" between Lyft and Carlson Wagonlit is just the latest acceptance of a wider corporate travel industry trend: acceptance of "sharing economy" type services (such as Lyft, Uber, and AirBnB).
Michael Qualantone, Executive Vice President of Global Supplier Relations at American Express Global Business Travel, says that his company's strategy has always been to provide its customers with a variety of options to best suit their needs, and part of those options have always included ride-share programs like Lyft and Uber.
Citing a study that GBT conducted with ACTE earlier this year, Qualantone says that nearly half of all travel managers had seen a year-over-year increase in the use of ride-share services, and nearly half of all travel managers permitted the use of sharing economy ground transportation services within policy. Qualantone concludes that not only do these trends suggest that business travelers are interested in using the same services for both business and personal travel, but that there's an increased acceptance of sharing economy services within the managed travel community.
But Qualantone is quick to qualify that while there's an increased acceptance of the sharing economy, a universal acceptance of the sharing economy in corporate travel is a bit of a ways off. "In our experience, some companies have declined to integrate ride-sharing into corporate travel policy on the grounds of safety," he says. "Partnerships between TMC and suppliers like Lyft or Uber should, therefore, be deeply integrated on the back-end to enable data sharing back to travel managers. Not only does this allow travel managers to have access to location data when needed, but it also provides buyers with more visibility into ground spend, an historically difficult category to manage."