Hi there,
Welcome the second issue of our quarterly Connectivity Newsletter, keeping you up-to-date on new tools and features available for you as a Booking.com Taxi Supply Partner.
What’s new?
Meeting Points & Pick up Instructions
Finding each other at the point of pickup has long been a challenge for our customers and drivers alike.
You now have the option to send meeting point information and pickup instructions via the API.
When you receive a booking you can now call the API to tell us:
- Where you want to meet the customer with GPS coordinates for the meeting point
- The name of the meeting point
- Pickup instructions of where to find the meeting point
- The type of pickup, e.g. meet & greet, desk or host
We plan for the information to be used in our customer facing Pickup Companion, so that customers find it easier to find their driver and have a better experience. 
The pickup instructions are located under the heading “Finding your driver” and you will have two options for sharing instructions with us:
- Our preferred method is for you to send us placeholders, e.g. the name of the meeting point and the location of it. We will then wrap our own instructions around this and translate them into all the 42 languages our customers speak.
- If option 1 is not possible we do support free text. We will generate the text for points 1 & 3 (since for meet & greet rides we always expect the driver to wait in the arrivals hall and hold a sign with the customer’s name on it) and you can fill in point 2.
Please see our documentation for more details on how to implement this feature.
Self-serve vehicle management
For users of our Partner Portal, we’ve created tools that will allow you to manage the vehicles in your fleet. That’s why now in the Partner Portal you can view the vehicles you have set up, along with details such as, passenger and luggage capacities as well as vehicle specific lead times if you have these.
In addition to this you can now also edit these details via the partner portal.
More information on how to edit lead times can be found here and information on how to edit passenger and suitcase capacities can be found here.
What’s next?
Vehicle information
Due to the prevalence of other providers in the market doing this, a feature our customers have come to expect is vehicle information. E.g. make/model, registration & vehicle colour.
This is obviously an important part of finding the right driver, but also for safety reasons, costumers want to be sure they’re getting in the right car.
We will soon make it possible for you to share information about your vehicle with us via API. We believe that by doing so you’ll improve things for our customers and therefore also increase your own quality scores.
We hope you found this insight into what’s happening in the world of Booking.com Taxi useful. Please see this link to previous newsletters for more information.
If you have any questions, please contact us.