When asked about a group of people hovering around a high table in the hallway of Jayride’s Sydney headquarters, founder and managing director Rod Bishop explained they were doing a daily pow-wow, and they were doing it standing to “keep it short”.
Once you are privvy to Bishop’s vision map for the company, you’ll quickly understand why they would need to keep meetings short – there is just too much to do. Plus, “moving fast” is one of its corporate values. I know that because a “Values Wall”, set in a prominent spot near the entrance – perhaps to keep everyone accountable to it – lists four groups of values for all to see and remember.
After having listed on the Australian Stock Exchange in January last year and going through a private funding journey prior, Jayride, a global online marketplace for airport transfers that begun seven years ago, has announced the completion of its foundation phase of its global strategy and is now looking to “refine” its offerings, push towards profitability and move to bigger things.
Jayride, a WiT Startup Pitch alumni from 2014, now boasts access to 85% of an estimated 7.7 billion annual airport trips globally, with a network that covers 3,332 transport companies at 1,511 airports in 81 countries. But it wasn’t so long ago that Jayride was only in five countries.
“Big TMCs like Flight Centre and Rome2Rio with which we have global preferred agreements, are very direct. When they say global, they mean global. ‘What is this five-country stuff you are doing? We want you everywhere please’”, said Bishop.
Demand was pushing them to go global as quickly as possible.
Travellers want more. “Everyone realises now that it doesn’t stop at the booking, and it doesn’t stop at the airport. People want to be able to provide amazing transformative value propositions. If I can book a flight, or I can book that same flight that is door-to-door, the second option is just fundamentally better, and if it works, it really sets my whole trip up for success. And that’s the thing we can provide to travel brands today.”
Of the new countries added this year, passenger trips booked have increased by 70% quarter-over-quarter. In Bali, one of Jayride’s fastest growing destinations, it is now generating 50% of total airport transfer bookings for Bali Fast Track.
Although Jayride is yet to put in multi-language capabilities, it is an action point in its “miles-long product roadmap”. Meanwhile, it is depending on partnerships to fuel its Asian base of customers both on the demand and the supply side.
Jayride is not yet profitable, but Bishop is confident the company is on track. He said the last 18 months or so have been heavily invested into international expansion for the purpose now of scaling its revenue to profitability. That global expansion was the “foundation piece”. With that now in place, Bishop said he sees its lifetime value and account value of large clients going up. “These things are strong tailwinds to profitability for us,” he said. “Profitability is a near term objective.”
Bishop (pictured right) is thinking still further ahead.
“The transport industry is in a transformational phase, much like hotels were when they were in their hotel club days and being confronted with the Internet and asking what was that all about. We are going now to transport companies and saying we are a global marketplace, and we can get you access to travellers everywhere. And they say technology what? Online marketplaces? My business comes from the kiosks at the airport and my relationships with concierges at hotels downtown. It is still very much offline behaviour.”
“Where we see Jayride going is being vocal in helping build a technology ecosystem around transport. Now that we have got 3,300 transport fleets online globally, we can say here’s the real-time vehicle standard that everyone should adopt. And here’s your path to market with vehicle position. I think we’ve got that kind of power now,” said Bishop. “Presenting every traveller with every vehicle in real-time around the world is ambitious, but can be done.”
He said with the success of ride hailing brands like Uber, Lyft, Grab, it is clear that a new traveller behaviour has cropped up which is about “last minute, no planning, get-a-ride wherever I am”.
With this, he sees an opportunity for Jayride to develop an open ecosystem and be the “NDC of ride hail” in a few years.
Describing a five-to-10 year-down-the-road Jayride, Bishop said it would be “every type of traveller, every type of trip, right down to the last minute ride-hailing from the street corner, with real-time rides being available, seat capacity, vehicle position, but not just for one company within a walled garden, but an ecosystem on an open platform.”
His vision is to be able to allow any company who is interested in putting a transport company to market somewhere on earth, to pull a customer demand data set from Jayride, see where every traveller needs to go in real-time across every source of demand and every fleet they are booking, and why they are choosing that, and then deploy or even build vehicles specifically for that ride service and destination and put them to market and service travellers. “It is a big data aggregation play, it’s a real-time booking and vehicle position play and it’s like a meta layer that sits on top of all ride service companies connecting them to all demand channels,” explains Bishop.
While he sees no need for additional investment at this point, he was also quick to say he would always be on the lookout for the next big opportunity, and that “developing a global standard for in-destination, real-time rides for every city on earth, for every transport company on earth” is a significant additional piece of work and Jayride would be “working out how to go after that”.
