Name: Scaling rides and meals without losing control
Uploaded: 2026-03-19T18:49:05.208Z
Duration: 32 min 52 s
Description: Scaling rides and meals without losing control

Transcript for "Scaling rides and meals without losing control": Welcome to today's webinar, Scaling Rides and Meals Without Losing Control. Today, we're going to take an in-depth look at how teams of all sizes manage rides and meals at scale, whether your employees are headed to the office, across town, or around the world. Hi everyone, I'm Vanessa Snow and I'm a senior manager on the global strategic accounts team here at Uber. I've actually been here with the company for nearly a decade. I'm based in the Bay Area and I lead an incredible team of global sales executives across almost every time zone and it's been a wild ride. I remember when we were just a small group working off Market Street. Since then, we've scaled globally to support our largest strategic partners, helping them navigate the complexities of a modern business travel world, as well as large transportation and meal delivery programs. And I'm thrilled to be joined here today by Jennifer, a key leader on my team. Jennifer has a really unique perspective on this industry from her time before Uber And while we wait for the last few folks to join our webinar, Jennifer, why don't you tell the group a little bit about your background? Thanks, Vanessa. Hi, everyone. I'm Jennifer Tornatore Knutson. I'm a senior global account executive on our strategic accounts team here at Uber. I've been here at Uber for about four and a half years and I'm based in Northern California. I'm actually having a bit of a full circle moment today. I started my career in the hotel industry, building out travel programs from the ground up for enterprise businesses. Back then, the focus was all on the stay. Today, I have come full circle. I am now helping those same global organizations leverage the best of Uber to solve the other half of the equation: seamless travel and meal solutions for their employees worldwide. I am passionate about people and travel and I am super excited to be with you here today. Let's kick off today's session with a little quick icebreaker. Vanessa, what is the most memorable place work has ever taken you? Oh, that's a fun one! Okay, I guess it's a bit of a toss-up. In a prior life, I was a consultant and a project actually took me to the underbelly of a nuclear power plant in the Southwest. Touring the facility and interviewing those engineers and VPs was absolutely fascinating and definitely a far cry from the typical office. But as far as international travel goes, my favorite experience was in Bangalore, India. Man, the warmth of the team there, who after work took me to their temples and fed me at their family's home was just really incredible. Wow, Vanessa, touring a nuclear power plant sounds fascinating. And I'm an avid chef and I love to cook Indian food and India is on my bucket list. When I think about that same question for myself, hands down I'd have to say Boise, Idaho and I know that isn't something people think of maybe the most fascinating at first, but let me tell you we went annually for a client's charity Pro Am, which featured private outdoor concerts for 200 guests. So after a day of golf we'd have some really good wine, good food, and there's nothing like seeing Lady A, Joan Jett, or Bon Jovi in an intimate outdoor venue to make a business trip feel more like a bucket list event. Oh my gosh, that sounds like a dream come true, how cool! You're speaking my language, golf, outdoor concerts, and wow, what a private event, incredible. I'm curious for everyone joining the call and with us live, please drop in your answer to that question in our icebreaker. It's fun as we're all planning our summer vacations or potentially team events. I'd love to hear what your response is. Cool and then before we get into the content, we're going to do a little housekeeping. Wow, some great answers, amazing, thanks for that icebreaker Jennifer. Okay, on to housekeeping. So, if you want to submit a question during our webinar, just look for the Q and A on the right side of the screen. We'll take as many of your questions as we can at the end of today's session and for the questions we don't get to, our team will follow-up, so don't worry. If you want to learn more about Uber, you can explore related content under the Docs tab. Click the Get Demo button at the top right of your screen to request a demo from our Uber team. We'll follow-up with you post webinar to get that set up. Alright, now that that's out of the way, let's get into the content for today. So, it's easy to think of Uber as a tool for individual trips. Someone needs a ride, they open an app, tap a button, and order one, And that's definitely part of it, but the platform is really built to do so much more. And for larger orgs, that difference really matters. Jennifer, I'd love for you to set the stage. What does managing rides and meals actually look like when you are doing it at a big scale? Absolutely. When you are doing it at a big scale, we are talking hundreds, sometimes thousands and tens of thousands of employees taking multiple trips and placing meal orders every single week across different cities, offices, and time zones. The final numbers aren't in, but global business travel was ready to pass $1,500,000,000,000 in 2025 and ground transportation alone accounts for roughly 11% of that budget, a share that likely to keep growing. Without the right structure, that volume creates real problems: fragmented spend, missed receipts, policy violations, and an admin burden that grows right along with your headcount. Instructors can't just be suggestions though and we see that with too big travel expenses outside of the Uber ecosystem. Only 34% of travelers book flights through approved corporate channels. That's lower for hotels at 28%. When your team is making purchases outside of your approved channels, that spend is completely invisible to your finance team until after it's spent And that's for the big expenses. For a week long trip, your traveler probably only has one hotel stay, but how often are they going to eat? Uber for Business helps make compliance easy. Request a ride, order a meal through the Uber and Uber Eats app and with centralized billing, your travelers don't have to worry about compliance. They don't have to worry about expensing. It's all handled through the programs that the admin has set up. Managing your team's ride and meal spend everywhere they spend is obviously important and when your team's jet setting around the globe or just working in offices around the world, it gets even trickier. Jennifer, do you want to take us through Uber for Business's global footprint? Absolutely, Vanessa. Uber for Business is almost everywhere. It's trusted by more than 200,000 organizations in more than 15,000 cities around the world, so your team is covered wherever they travel for work. You know I always get asked about who's taken an Uber somewhere really interesting and I love telling this story about a friend of mine. They were hiking in a fairly remote part of the Scottish Highlands and ended up much further from their base than they planned to as the day was starting to end and the sun was going down. And on a whim they checked the app expecting nothing and then found one lone driver in a nearby village. That Uber didn't just take them home, that driver ended up being a local historian who gave them a private forty minute moonlight tour of the ruins they had just hiked past. It turned a stressful mistake into the highlight of their entire trip. Oh my goodness, that's such a great story and I always love it when Uber winds up being a highlight of your travels. I guess for the day to day reality of business travel, let's be honest, Highland cows are rarely involved. So, let's talk about some of the ways Uber's global reach impacts your travelers on a more regular basis. For most employees, this isn't about international trips. It's the daily commute, grabbing lunch, staying late on a project. And with Uber Eats, wherever your team is working, midsize city, satellite office, hotel room between meetings, they've got access to local restaurants, grocery, everyday essentials, even client gifts, all through the same platform they're already using for personal purchases. There's no separate app for Uber for Business. Your team uses the same Uber and Uber Eats apps they already know and love. By toggling to their business profile, they can be sure that everything they're doing is within policy and they won't have to worry about keeping that receipt. So, as we start thinking about bigger organizations, you can see how that makes some big impacts. But bigger organizations mean more travelers with different needs. Jennifer, how does Uber for Business help make sure that everyone gets the rides they need? You know Vanessa, one of the most common mistakes I see across orgs of any size is setting up a single ride policy and applying it across the board to everyone. It's definitely an option and it works really well for some companies, but if you're looking to optimize your budget while still delivering excellent experiences for your team, it can help to create some definition. Some of the most common ways we see companies divide the rides they offer to their teams is by something like use case or your level in the org chart. If you want to offer your teams commutes to and from the office, UberX is the perfect option for that. And if your team is particularly interested in keeping their carbon footprint light, Uber Electric can be a great addition to your commute plan, delivering rides in a hybrid or an electric vehicle while helping your cost per trip stay low. Business Comfort and Business Electric are really built for the business traveler and they are a step up offering extra legroom, newer cars, and options for your riders to set their preferences from temperature and whether or not they want to have conversations. If you're headed to a meeting, and I often use this, I'm in the back typing away doing last minute prep, I just want a nice quiet ride and so my preference is a quiet car. You can make all of those choices and that can all be done with this ride type. It is also a great way to start a work trip for team members who are headed to the airport, and some companies choose to offer this level of ride as a perk for certain members in their organization, such as directors or above. But for those times when the premium option makes the most sense, that's where Uber Business Black and Uber Business Black SUV come in. It is the perfect option for the executive travel, taking clients out for dinner or really impressing that candidate you are trying to get to join your team. Both of these options come with features designed to make a great impression including premium cars, more time to meet your ride, and extended support and on time pickup protection. So now that we have gone through these levels of ride types, you might be wondering how your team knows what is available to them. This is all managed through programs and groups, which we will go over a little later. If your team ever wants to check on their program details, they can hop into the Business Hub in the Uber and Uber Eats app and see exactly what ride and meal options are available for them. To do so, you want to click Account, scroll down and click Business Hub, and from there you'll see the details from your workplace perks and benefits. Awesome! So, when you are ready to add your team and you want to do it at scale, one of the most important options is a CSV upload. This allows you to bulk import your employee list, assign groups, and set access levels all at once. From there, you're dialing in on ride type restrictions, if you need them, spend limits per trip per day, geographic restrictions, hours of availability, and required expense codes, so every trip is tagged correctly from the start. And when someone gets promoted or changes teams, you just update the group that they're in. Jennifer will talk more about roster sync and SFTP integrations a little later on, which makes the process even easier. Now, let's take a look at how to set up groups. First, you'll click on team and select groups. From there, you can click create groups in the upper right corner of the page. You can name the group and add a description. Many companies choose to build groups around job titles or functions, but the important thing to keep in mind is that everyone in the group is going to be able to use Uber for Business in the same way. The way we decide exactly how they can use it is by assigning programs to that group. So what about programs? From your dashboard, click programs on the left, Then click create program. You can either copy an existing program if you already have one you like or create something new. From there, choose the type of program you'd like to create and we'll start with travel. Name the program, give it a description, and then we start setting up the rules. For a travel program, you can choose the locations the program works in, the ride types available to your traveler, the times and the day the program is available, and how much of that ride your company is going to cover. Using these settings, your company can cover everything from $25 of your team's commute to 100% of their airport trips and international travel. It's really up to you. And once that's set up, you can choose which groups have access to this program. Each group can have access to multiple programs and if you want a clear picture of all the access your groups have, that's available back in your groups tab. So, that's a look at how to get up and running with Uber for Business. But Jennifer, we all know teams change often. Can you talk a little bit about managing your team's roster? The roster challenge, it's very real. At bigger companies, the roster is never static. People join, people leave, people change teams, they get promoted, it's constant. Trying to keep up with all of that manually just isn't a sustainable workflow. That's why Uber for Business built deep integrations with the HR and finance tools you are already using. And the one we get asked about a ton is SAP Concur. Vanessa, could you walk us through that? I'd love to. Automations and integrations are one of my favorite topics, and Concur has such a great one. So, with the standard SAP Concur roster sync, your employee list stays automatically aligned. Someone joins, they're added. Someone leaves, they're removed from the Uber for Business roster. Nothing is manual. But the feature I really want to highlight is the ability to sync select employees from your roster, which is especially valuable when you're rolling out in phases. And over the years, this has been a highly requested feature that I'm so excited we've brought to our customers today and our partners. So, now you're available to sync a specific subset, a department, a location, a call center instead of your whole org at once. You can preview exactly how many employees will be affected before you proceed with the sync. And you can decide to sync only or sync and invite, leaving you the option to import employees into the dashboard without sending an invite yet, which is perfect when you're piloting one, with a team, a small team first. And so, when someone leaves, their access will be revoked automatically. No manual offboarding step required. Vanessa, we've got other sync options available too, if those are a better fit for your organization. We have SFTP. If you already have SFTP workflows set up for other tools, this is a straightforward way to automate employee data syncs on a scheduled basis. We also have SCIM provisioning. For orgs on Okta or OneLogin, this automatically syncs the moment someone is onboarded in your identity provider and revokes access automatically when they leave. And of course there is CSV uploads for bulk ads or one time refreshes when an automated sync isn't in place yet. Whatever route you take, the goal is the same: accurate, real time roster data with as little admin lift as possible. There's more to manage than just your roster though. Vanessa, how can admins manage rides and meals? Ah, yes, for this topic I really want to emphasize the advantage of having a unified platform. Think about a typical employee day. They commute on a ride credit, grab lunch on a meal allowance, stay late and take a ride home, and maybe order dinner along the way. No one feels like ad hoc business travel in the traditional sense. But every single one of these moments is Uber for Business serving you and your employee the ins and outs of their office work generating data that flows back to your finance team. When you manage rides and meals together, you get centralized visibility, consistent policy, and one employee experience across everything and reporting that doesn't require reconciling data from two separate platforms. The complete picture makes it a lot easier to optimize your program, govern your spend, and justify your investment in business travel. Jennifer, can you help us take a look at how we see the big picture and what it looks like when admins are actually using the platform? Yes, I'd love to walk through admin experience when using the platform. First is a personalized homepage. When you log into the platform, the first thing you'll see is your personalized homepage. This page includes your at a glance summary of recent spending, activity, and transactions, and suggested actions and platform insights based on usage. For example, employees who haven't joined yet, spending trends, and other things like that. The home page is great for getting an overview and if you want to dive deeper into the specifics of your Uber for Business instance, the tabs on the left let you do just that. Let's start with the programs tab. The Programs tab lists all active, inactive, travel, and meal programs with their associated policy rules, expense codes, spending limits, location restrictions, permitted ride types, and schedules. And it lets you show stakeholders exactly what guardrails are enforced before a ride or meal is ever requested. When you want to see what is happening in those programs, that's when we can turn to the activities tab. This tab is the core transaction level view, every ride and meal in one list, which you can filter by employee, date, or location. This is a great place to check-in on how things are going with your programs, or to look for more info on a specific ride or meal. But this is also where you can get data out of the platform whenever you need it. From the Activities tab, you can export a detailed CSV, which will be emailed to you, with 30 plus fields that include timestamps, addresses, fare breakdowns, fees, expense codes, vehicle types, payment method, and invoice URLs. Or you can bounce down to the Reports tab and set up a report that gives you exactly the info you need, including filtering to allow views of specific locations, specific people, or custom ranges. When you want to manage the people taking these rides or ordering the deliveries that make up all this data, that's when the Teams tab comes in handy. Teams, peoples, and group. The team tab is made up of both people and groups. In the people tab, view all employees by status whether they're active, awaiting approval, or they haven't joined yet. And you can manage role based access to admin and reporting views. In the groups tab, you can see headcount per department or cost center for roster alignment. Of course, there's one area that's incredibly important to get insights to, even if it's not anyone's favorite. It's definitely not mine and that's billing. So let's take a look at the billing tab because it's really important. Here's where you'll find a monthly financial summary with spending to date, credit limit, invoices, past payments, and downloadable transaction CSV's. You can manage payment methods and toggle between pay per trip or monthly billing. The Billing tab is the place to look at the dollars and cents of your Uber for Business activity, but we know it's not the only numbers you're interested in. To get more insights, well that's when you can check out the Insights tab. In the Travel subtabs you'll see total spend, ride count, rides by location and time of day, with an outside working hours toggle Spend per ride type, and Top spenders, all over a custom date range. The Meals subtab delivers the same information you get in the Travel subtab but for your meal programs: total spend, number of orders, top spenders viewable through a date range that works for you. Finally, the People subtab shows employee enrollment, activation and first trip metrics to measure platform adoption. All of this information is designed to help you make better decisions about how Uber for Business works for your team and how you can set up programs to make the biggest impact on your business. To see the impact your team is having on the world, we can turn to the Sustainability tab. Uber for Business Sustainability Insights allow you to track total CO2 emissions, your average CO2 per mile, low emission trip percentage, and estimated miles traveled. This data is also filterable by date range and program and department, built to support corporate ESG reporting. That's a look at some of the ways you can use the information inside the Uber for Business platform, but we also know that it can be helpful to pull information out, especially when it comes to expensing. Next, we'll talk a little about how easy it is to use Uber for Business with many of the top expensing providers. Expense Integrations The dashboard gives you centralized visibility into all ride and meal spend, filterable by employee, team, time period, and geography. Expensing gets even easier with the integrations that are available with top expensing platforms. With the right setup, everything arrives in your expense system pre categorized and tagged with project codes. No manual uploads, no chasing receipts at the end of the month. Vanessa, can you talk a little bit more about why expensing is so important? Yes, so without automated expensing that the Uber for Business platform brings, we know how much work can go into turning in a receipt. You find your email, you find it in your email, you download it, you log into your expense platform, create a new entry, upload the receipt, fill in the category and cost center, add the project code, submit. A few minutes minimum if you're lucky per expense. In fact, GBTA reports one in five expense reports contain an error. Each expense report takes eighteen minutes and $52 to fix. Now multiply that by hundreds of employees and dozens of trips per quarter, it's a massive, entirely avoidable drain on everyone's time. With an integration in place, the employee does nothing. Finance gets clean, pre categorized data in real time and admins can audit anytime without waiting on end of period reconciliation. Well Vanessa, it looks like we are getting towards the end of our time, but I want to make sure we have time for questions, so let's just bring it all together. To put it all together: global support for your team in more than 15,000 cities, flexible program design that gives everyone access to exactly what you want them to have, automated roster sync that saves your team time, unified visibility across rides and meals, and expense integrations that eliminate big amounts of manual work entirely. Plus, Uber for Business has no upfront cost, minimum spending requirements, or fixed commitments. The organizations getting the most value here aren't using Uber for Business for occasional trips, they're using it as a core operational system day in and day out. Vanessa, any other thoughts as we head into Q and A? So I guess my one piece of advice to everyone is to start with structure. Even if it's not perfect, having some idea of how you want your programs set up gives you a great starting point. Keep the focus on the experience you want to deliver to your travelers, set up your programs to enable that, and then you can adapt and tweak as users start getting real world experience. I love that everything is changeable in the Uber for Business program and it goes live immediately. So then you can map your employee groups to your HR and expense workflows before you scale, and that upfront investment pays off enormously. So, that wraps up our scheduled content for today but we've got some questions you asked during the registration and we want to make sure we get to them now. Jennifer, what's the first question on our list? Vanessa, our first question is for Michael. How does this service work for multiple locations spread across The U. S? Could you take that one? How does it work? Pretty well. No, so there are a couple ways you can approach this, Michael, and thanks for your question. The most straightforward one is creating groups for each of the areas you have an office. So you might set up a Seattle group, an Austin group, and an Indianapolis group, You can then assign those groups to programs based in those areas. The Austin group might have further commutes than the Seattle group and you can set that for each area. Of course, you will have some people who won't fit cleanly into those groups and you can solve for that too. Creating a group for executives can mean you add them to programs where they don't have any commute limits. If the CEO wants a ride to the airport, you may want to make sure she can get it however far away she is. So this next one is from Natalie. How much does Uber for Business cost? Okay, Jennifer, I'll take this one. So Uber for Business, it's free to sign up, and actually it has no minimum spending or upfront costs. So it allows for companies to pay per ride or food order. Sue asked, why use Uber Business for a small company of 15 people? What would you say to her? Sure, so this is going to sound like a corporate answer, but it's true. Uber for Business is going to make your expensing easier, even if it's just for one person or one employee. Uber for Business is great for handling large scale companies, but even for small teams, it reduces the friction around chasing receipts down as much as we've, as much so much that we've even had one person shops use Uber for Business simply so they don't have to worry about tracking their business expenses for rides and meals when tax season comes around. Wow, that's amazing. Right? Yes, yes. Alright, well, thanks again to Jennifer for helping to answer all of those questions and thanks to everyone for joining us. Following today's event, you'll receive a link to the recording to revisit any of this content at a later date. And again, if you'd like to learn more about any of today's material, please visit our website or contact one of our team members to request a custom demo. And thank you for everyone for joining. We hope to see you all again soon. Thanks for having me, Vanessa. This has been fabulous.