Casino Taxi tackles Uber app with its own technology upgrade
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The Casino Taxi jingle is as familiar to many Halifax residents as a popular Christmas carol.
The taxi company is a third-generation family-owned business that has been around since the 1920s.
Brian Herman is president and operations manager. His wife, Angie Herman, is director of finance and administration, and his sister, Paula George, is vice-president and controller. Her husband, Jason George, is director of IT and communications.
Herman’s grandfather, Warren Spicer, bought the company with a business partner in 1958. Brian and his sister inherited the business from his mother, Karen Herman.
Herman said he’s been working on upgrading Casino’s dispatching and communications systems for two or three years.
“Because what we were planning to do touched on every single area of our business, it took a lot of planning and it took the right season for us to make this switchover,” he said in an interview.
“With taxis, our business is seasonal, demand is highly seasonal. So, any massive changes we needed to do to our business has to be done between the months of May and July. Any later than that, we’re starting to get into students coming back, all the winter demand adding up.
“We had made the plans to switch to our new systems a number of years ago but we needed to wait until June of 2020 to do it. Unfortunately, COVID happened right at the time we were starting our project,” Herman said.
“In some ways it was tough to move forward with such a massive change to our business right at the time our business was taking such a massive downturn but, that said, it was actually a good time as well because business was lower and we could spend more time focusing on what we needed to do on the project. In some ways, it was a bit of a blessing.”
The technology upgrade wasn’t necessarily in response to the threat of Uber, he said.
“From our perspective, we basically went with a completely different dispatch systems provider. Our previous provider, we were with I’d say 15 to 18 years, and they definitely did a really good job, it was a really good system . . . but the app they developed, which was a white-label app we rebranded Casino Taxi, didn’t do all of the things we wanted it to.”
A white-label app is from a private development company, rebranded by other firms.
“Essentially, what we ended up doing was switching our entire dispatch systems provider, which is all of our back-end order-taking software, trip-assignment software, in-vehicle driver app, in-vehicle passenger app. And we actually took that opportunity to upgrade our phone systems to a similar provider, which allows us to increase our efficiencies through a little bit of automation on the phone system,” said Herman
“It has definitely allowed us to capitalize on some additional automation in terms of allowing customers to check on the status of their ride and book some of their rides that are recurring on a pretty simple basis,” he said.
“What we were looking for was an already existing product with proven experience in the taxi market. So, the company we ended up going with is based out of Ireland. They have a lot of experience in the U.K. and had most recently broken into the North American market with a few companies in the U.S. and a handful of companies in Canada.”
Herman said Casino was keeping an eye on other companies that acquired the system.
“It’s always really good for us to know we’ve got folks that we know on the taxi side that can give us their honest opinion after they’ve gone live with the system.”
Casino management is more than happy with the new system. Herman describes it as “absolutely incredible.”
