The Address Nobody Will Give You

The booking says near the station, call when you're close. The driver calls when he is close. No answer. He calls again from a bus stop that is not the right bus stop.

Nineteen minutes later he is in the right building. The guest is apologetic. Nobody did anything wrong, and the night is short one run.

This is not a rude-customer problem

The instinct is that the guest was being careless. Usually they were not.

⭕ People give a vague address for a reason they consider obvious, and the reason is almost never that they cannot be bothered:

• They are somewhere they would rather not name into a phone with other people in the room
• It is a hotel and they do not know the room number yet
• The building has no number anybody uses locally
• They are not there yet themselves

⚠️ Insisting harder at the point of booking does not fix any of those four. It loses you the third one, who books somewhere else next time.

⇒ The Guest Who Books For Someone Else

Where the time actually goes

Break one of these bookings into its parts and the driving is not the expensive bit.

The call that does not connect

The guest is inside a lift, or on a floor with no signal, or has the phone face down. This is the single largest block of wasted time in outcall work and it costs nothing to reduce — it just needs to happen before the driver is moving, not after.

The second address

⚠️ Roughly one in six vague bookings turns out to be a different address from the one taken — a hotel behind the hotel, a rear entrance, a second building with the same name. The driver arrives at a place that matches what he was told and is still in the wrong place.

⇒ The Booking Nobody Confirmed

The return

The run that finished nineteen minutes late does not just cost nineteen minutes. It moves every booking behind it, and the last one of the night is the one that gets cancelled.

⇒ Two Cars, Three Bookings

What works instead of insisting

The venues that lose the least time to this do two small things, neither of which involves demanding a full address on the call.

They confirm by message twenty minutes before, not by phone on arrival

A message asks for the room number at the moment the guest actually knows it, and it can be answered from a lift. ⭕ The confirmation window is the fix, not the booking form.

⇒ The Standing Booking Nobody Confirms

They keep what they learned about the building

The rear entrance, the concierge who phones up, the barrier code — attached to the address, not to the driver who found out.

⇒ The Driver Who Knows The Route

The number worth knowing

Count the runs last month where the driver arrived and waited more than five minutes. Not the disasters — the ordinary ones.

⭕ Most outcall operators who count this for the first time find it is between a fifth and a third of their runs, and that the same six buildings account for most of it. Six buildings is a solvable problem. A vague-address problem is not.

Read next

• Outcall Dispatch: Turnaround Time Is the Whole Business
• The Driver Who Knows The Route
• Two Cars, Three Bookings
• The Booking Nobody Confirmed