Tonight I picked up a young lady in York Road Waterloo who asked to be taken to Wapping High Street via a cash machine, once she was in the cab I asked the lady if the only reason she needed to find a cash machine was to pay for the Taxi to which her reply was “yes”. As I am the type of driver who hates stopping at a cash machine I told her that there was no need as she was more than welcome to pay the fare using her credit or debit card for which there would be no additional charge, the lady then said “oh, are you on Hailo?” which I obviously am.
She then went on to explain that the company that she works for had made a corporate decision to switch from Addison Lee in favour of using Hailo, this was something that obviously pleased me as a London Taxi driver, I then asked her why her company had come to this decision. She then went on to tell me that 6 key members of staff had been using Hailo for the last three months to try it out and compare it to Addison Lee and that they had a number of reasons for the change. These reasons were that Hailo had been consistently faster, the drivers were more friendly, the drivers spoke clear English, the drivers knew where they were going, and that in most cases using Hailo was working out cheaper than using Addison Lee.
She then elaborated and went on to tell me a few horror stories of the experiences of using Addison Lee, she said that she had been to a meeting in America and then gone straight to the airport after the meeting to board a flight, she had Addison Lee booked to collect her from Heathrow to go to her home address in Wapping, she said that she was so tired that as soon as she got into the car at Heathrow that she fell asleep, after about an hour she awoke to find herself in an unfamiliar area and eventually discovered that she was in Oxford! The driver had taken her to completely the wrong place,, she told the driver that he was supposed to have taken her to Wapping in London E1 and said that she had trouble trying to make him understand as he spoke very little English, when eventually they arrived in Wapping the driver then had the audacity to demand more money for the extra journey, she went on to state that her experience was not an isolated case and that one of her colleagues had ended up in Southampton instead of London and that four similar incidents had occurred whilst using Addison Lee.
She also said that there were a number of Addison Lee drivers her her company would not use and that their receptionist had to state this when booking a car with Add Lee, she said that many of their staff had bad experiences using Add Lee and that they were eventually glad to get away from them and find an alternative.
If these stories that this lady relayed to me are true, and I have no reason to doubt her then her company cannot be the only ones who are having these types of experiences when using companies such as Add Lee so it begs the question as to why these companies continue to use them when they are clearly getting a substandard service?
She ended the journey by thanking me and stating that as far as she was concerned that the launch of Hailo had been a breath of fresh air for her and her company.
