Uber Reserve Case Study

About Uber Reserve

Uber wants to be a traveler’s first choice for airport pickups and drop-offs. Uber's tech is known for its ease of use: customers push a button and get a ride on demand, whenever and wherever they need it.

With Uber Reserve, customers can follow this format, but also schedule a ride up to 30 days in advance, meaning they can step off the plane and into their designated car.

As travel can be unpredictable, Uber Reserve provides a sense of certainty when things don’t go as planned. Integrating with OAG’s technology platform automatically updates the reservation time based on flight information, so your Uber ride is waiting when your flight lands, whether it’s on time, early, or delayed.

The challenge

Prior to working with OAG, Swissport sourced schedule data from multiple sources, such as airlines and airports. Updating their database manually was found to be time-consuming and difficult to validate. Any schedule changes that came in, whether via Telex, email, or SSIM file, needed to be updated manually, resulting in processing substantial amounts of data once per week and making changes difficult to track.

As well as an overview of their operational landscape, Swissport were looking to enable and empower their commercial teams with the freshest data, allowing them to make strategic decisions against the current industry landscape and react quickly. Swissport needed a tool that would collate accurate schedules data, could be managed from one place, and exported into various accessible formats for a global multi-disciplinary team.

Eager to future-proof their operations to ensure scalability and innovation, a solution that didn’t require time-consuming manual downloading and uploading of data was also key.

Considering Swissport’s global presence in over 280 airports, with plans for expansion, and serving over 230 million passengers per year, they needed to have access to reliable and accurate data with versatile and scalable delivery methods that could grow with them.

The solution

As the leading provider of aviation data and insights, Swissport chose OAG to provide them with a comprehensive view of global airline Schedules and Seats data, refreshed weekly and delivered via Flight Info Direct. Flight Info Direct, powered by Snowflake, is a global aviation data warehouse, containing all of OAG’s data sets, ready to query, integrate and analyze. It allows seamless cross-departmental collaboration and eliminates data silos across organizations, providing instant access to global aviation data.

By accessing Schedules Data in Flight Info Direct, Swissport now has global access to over 70 million forward looking flight schedules and more than 500,000 daily flight schedule changes at the click of a button. They also have access to all other OAG data sets within the same platform, should they need to utilize them in the future.

By provisioning Snowflake, Swissport were able to easily slot Flight Info Direct into their systems and workflows to ensure reliable and automated updates.

Since air travel can be unpredictable, we wanted to partner with one of the world's leading travel data providers - and for this new Uber product to be successful, we knew we needed an accurate and reliable source of real time flight data.We vetted OAG’s analytical tools and APIs, and with more than one million flight status updates daily, including 97% of worldwide flight coverage, we're confident that OAG is the right partner to power Reserve.

Rob Mitchell, Head of Business Development for Airports, Events and Travel, Uber

Testimonial

We spoke to Rob Mitchell, Head of Business Development for Airports, Events and Travel at Uber, and here's what he had to say about Uber's partnership with OAG;

Q: How did you hear about OAG, and when did you first make OAG part of Uber Reserve?

A: OAG is practically a household name for aviation enthusiasts, many of us at Uber included. My dad traveled all the time for work, and he would bring home the original OAG Pocket Flight Guide, which I would often read cover-to-cover. Fast forward to our early discussions about Uber Reserve and other products for which we might need real-time flight status data, and we knew we could turn to OAG – the company knows that good data is the backbone of the travel industry and puts the needs of its customers first.

Q: Can you describe a few of the reasons you decided to partner with OAG? For example, anything about OAG’s data and platform capabilities that were most appealing to your team?

A: At Uber, our goal is to help you go anywhere and get anything. That includes getting to and from the airport as easily and smoothly as possible. And, since air travel can be unpredictable, we wanted to partner with one of the world’s leading travel data providers to improve the airport pickup experience. With more than one million flight status updates daily, including 97% of worldwide flight coverage, OAG was the ideal partner for Uber Reserve at airports.

Q: How does OAG support Uber Reserve?

A: Uber works with OAG to help coordinate flight tracking for riders and drivers. Within 24-hours of a flight landing, the rider will be notified in the Uber app of a delay or potential early arrival. The technology, powered by OAG, then adjusts the reservation pickup time automatically and informs the driver. This way the driver is ready the moment you land.

Find out more about Flight Info API here

Read the Full Q&A here

Find out more about Uber Reserve here