Ride EZ: a quote and a booking in one step

Ride EZ is an American transportation company running luxury car and limo service across the Greater Phoenix area — airport transfers, resort runs and hourly car-and-driver hire.

The price was the bottleneck

Booking a car meant asking what it would cost, and asking meant either a phone call or a form followed by a wait. Somebody at the company read the request, worked the distance against the rate card by hand, and replied.

That wait is where the bookings went. A traveller comparing two airport transfers does not wait for an email from either — they book the one that has already told them the price. And every quote answered by hand costs staff time whether or not it converts.

Working with Smakgraphics, who designed the site, in 2010 I built the part that closes the gap: quoting and booking as one form rather than two conversations.

How it works

• A PHP endpoint receives the booking details from the form.

• The Google Maps API resolves the pick-up and drop-off addresses and returns the distance between them.

• That distance is priced against the company's rate card and returned to the customer immediately.

• The customer confirms against a price they can already see, and the booking is emailed through to the company.

The outcome was a conversion rate rather than a feature. The customer gets a fare in the same sitting they asked for it and confirms while they are still deciding; nobody at the company prices a trip by hand, and nobody waits for an answer.

The 2010 site has since been replaced, so the version described here is no longer online.