Fixed-Price Airport Quotes — and Keep the Customer for Next Time

For licensed London Hackney drivers. UK-only.

Every cabbie reading this has done the same drop at Heathrow Terminal 5 a hundred times. Passenger pays, says "cheers, mate", wheels their case across the kerb, disappears into Departures. You pull off and join the rank cycle for the return trip. The fare's gone into the meter and the relationship has gone into the bin.

The airport run is statistically the single most valuable journey in a cabbie's day. It's also the single biggest missed opportunity. The passenger who just paid £105 + drop-off fee for that journey to T5 is, almost by definition, someone who travels. They'll be back at Heathrow next month. Probably the month after. Possibly fortnightly. Every time, they'll need a taxi to or from the airport.

If they've got your number, they'll text you. If they haven't, they'll open an app or hail one off the rank. The whole difference — between the £105 fare becoming the start of a relationship vs the end of one — is what happens in the thirty seconds at the kerb.

This post is about closing that gap. Specifically: how the BAT.TAXI airport quote system + the kerb-side invite loop converts the single most valuable journey in your day into a recruitment moment for the rest of the year.

Why airports are the perfect BAT.TAXI use case

BAT.TAXI is a pre-book only service — currently a one-hour minimum lead time, reducible if/when required. That's not a coincidence. Airports are the textbook pre-book scenario for exactly the same reason the lead time exists:

The passenger knows when they're flying.
They need certainty about the pickup.
They've usually got a fixed budget in mind ("I'd rather pay £75 known than £125 surge").
They want to plan, not race for a cab.

Every reason a passenger wants to pre-book an airport ride is also a reason BAT.TAXI is the right system for the cabbie to take it. It produces a fixed price, a proper TfL-compliant booking record, and a customer relationship that survives the journey.

How the airport quote works

Your customer requests a quote, you see a message has come through on the BAT.TAXI home screen icon, you tap on the icon and open the BAT.TAXI driver dashboard, tap on the quote received, add your price and send — Heathrow, Gatwick, City, Stansted, Luton.

That's the driver's side — a few taps.

The passenger receives the quote on their BAT.TAXI passenger app and either accepts or rejects it. If they accept, it becomes a confirmed booking; if they reject, the quote's cancelled. Either way the price is fixed — and the moment they confirm, the system generates a proper, TfL-compliant pre-booking record. (See post #4 on the booking record fields for the compliance detail.)

You take the job. Same fare you quoted. No meter dispute at the end. No "actually it's £85 because the traffic was bad". The price was set when the booking was made, the customer accepted it, and that's what they pay.

For the cabbie, this is friction removed. For the passenger, this is certainty bought — and provable savings, which we'll come to in a moment.

Why fixed pricing wins at the airport specifically

Airport passengers are extremely price-sensitive — but not because they want to pay less. They want to know what they'll pay before they get in the cab.

This is also where the Hackney pricing rule does the cabbie a favour. By Hackney carriage law, a cabbie's quoted fixed price has to come in at or below what the metered fare would have been for the same journey. So when a cabbie quotes a fixed price, it's structurally a discount versus the meter — it has to be, by regulation.

How this plays out in practice on a Mayfair-to-Heathrow run: the typical metered fare lands £95–£110 depending on traffic, time of day, and which terminal. A cabbie's fixed-price quote — say £70 — is comfortably below the lower bound of that range. And here's the bit passengers love. During the journey the cabbie puts the meter on. Not for charging — the price is already fixed at £70. The meter runs to demonstrate the saving. The passenger watches the meter climb past £100 while knowing they're paying £70. The meter is the proof that the fixed-price deal worked in their favour.

That's a different category of passenger experience from a metered ride (where the meter climbs and the passenger feels anxious about the final cost) and a different category again from a taxi-app ride (where dynamic pricing means the passenger doesn't know the final cost until the end, and surge can spike it). BAT.TAXI's fixed-price-with-meter-running combination is certainty before the journey + provable saving after. It's what passengers have always wanted from London cab travel.

Fixed-price airport quoting like this is what the corporate taxi accounts and the hotel concierges have been offering passengers for thirty years (at a premium). Until now, the only way an individual cabbie could compete with that was either to quote informally on the back of a fare card (no booking record, regulatory risk — see post #4) or to take app work where the customer relationship belonged to the platform, not the cabbie.

The BAT.TAXI airport quoting system gives the individual cabbie what only firms had before: a fixed-price quote with a proper booking record. The fare structure is yours. The customer is yours. The relationship is yours.

The kerb-side conversion loop

Now for the part most posts about "airport booking systems" skip — what to do with the passenger you just dropped off at the kerb.

This is the part the founder of BAT.TAXI, Peter Schive, and the fifteen other London cabbies he's been operating with for the last eighteen months have been doing manually in their own cabs. Long before any of this was software.

Here is the loop in detail:

You take the airport job. You arrive on time. The metered fare says £105 + drop-off fee, that's what they pay.
At the kerb, you give them your card. Either physically (a business card, or the customer clicks on your QR code Driver Pack QR card in the back of the cab) or digitally (you tap on your dashboard and send them an invite link, whichever way they become a new long term customer where you own the customer relationship).
You say one specific thing. "When you're flying back, message me direct — I'll do you a fixed price the same way." That's it. No upsell, no marketing pitch, no leaflet of legal terms. One sentence at the kerb.
A meaningful fraction of those passengers take the card. Not all — maybe one in four, maybe one in three depending on the route and the conversation. But enough.
A meaningful fraction of those use it. Maybe half the people who take the card will actually book a return run through BAT.TAXI. The ones who do tend to come back repeatedly because they've now solved the airport-taxi problem permanently.

What this looks like over six months: every fare you've been doing to the airport anyway, you've been treating as a recruitment opportunity. By month three you've got a handful of regulars. By month six you've got a book of airport regulars who book you directly. By month twelve, the airport runs you're doing are mostly your regulars — and your share of pre-booked work goes up while your dependence on the rank or the apps goes down.

This is the lived experience of the 16-cabbie network that operated the BAT.TAXI model manually for eighteen months. It's not a theory — it's a playbook.

What happens if you can't take the booking — the Co Driver mechanic

A practical question every cabbie asks: "What if I've already booked something else for that morning?"

The Co Driver mechanic handles it. When you redirect a booking from your dashboard, the job details — including the price and conditions you already agreed with your customer — get advertised to your trusted Co Driver network. An accepting driver takes the work on your terms: same fixed price, same drop-off fee, same agreed conditions. The customer experience is identical regardless of which driver actually fulfils the job.

This is the structural reason the network works. The passenger's quoted £75 stays £75. No mid-booking renegotiation. No surprise price changes. The relationship you've built with that passenger is preserved — and so is your reputation with them — even when a Co Driver covers a clash.

(See post #4 on the Co Driver mechanic for the full mechanic detail.)

What it costs

Same two BAT.TAXI tiers — the airport quote system is included in both at no per-job charge.

Platform Only: £4.99/month or £39.99/year. UK national rollout + international. Digital only.
Driver Pack (London-only soft launch): £99 first year (marketing pack + platform included free); £39.99/year from Year 2. Includes the digital platform plus physical in-cab marketing — including the QR-coded cards specifically designed for the kerb-side handoff — and the Airport Pricing dashboard feature (drivers list their own airport prices on sign-up; the system prints them on the partition sticker and tip-up adverts and surfaces them in the dashboard under "Airport Prices"). (Read about the Driver Pack.)

Real maths: one returning airport regular booked at £75 × 12 trips/year = £900/year. The Driver Pack tier costs less than 5% of that. The Platform Only tier costs around 6%. A single converted regular pays for the subscription twenty times over. The second regular is pure margin.

FAQ

Which airports does the quote system cover? Heathrow (all terminals), Gatwick (North + South), London City, Stansted, Luton. Fixed prices loaded for standard pickup zones from the most common London origins. If your pickup is from an unusual location, you can manually adjust the quote before sending — the system gives you the suggested base, you have full control to tweak it. One to remember, let your customers know you can give them a quote for any airport or seaport in the country, as they simply need to ask for a prebook quote, and if the price is right you can legally pickup pre-booked work outside of London.

How does the fixed-price quote compare to the meter? By Hackney carriage law, a cabbie's quoted fixed price has to come in at or below what the metered fare would have been for the same journey. In practice, cabbies quote comfortably below the typical metered range — for example, £70 against a Mayfair-to-Heathrow meter that typically lands £95–£110 depending on traffic and terminal. During the journey, you put the meter on (not for charging — the price is already fixed) to demonstrate the saving. The passenger watches the meter climb past £100 while knowing they're paying £70. The meter is the proof. Fixed price means known fare; meter on means provable saving.

Can I add drop-off fees and surcharges? Yes. The drop-off fee is a separate field in the quote — you set it (or the system suggests the standard). Same for any wait-time charge if the passenger is being collected and there's a layover.

What if the customer cancels at the last minute? The booking record retains the full timeline — booking made, customer confirmed, customer cancelled. You can set your own cancellation policy with regular customers (most cabbies operating the model manually have a one-hour cancellation cut-off; BAT.TAXI makes this enforceable through the booking record). Cancellation policy enforcement is a feature the platform supports and the cabbie configures.

Can I take an airport job for a customer I've never met before? Yes — that's exactly the kerb-side loop above. Someone who came in via your QR / business card / referral can book a Heathrow run before you've ever shaken their hand. The booking record + the fixed-price quote + the customer-facing T&Cs that the system surfaces are what protect both sides on a first booking.

What's the lead time minimum for an airport booking? The 1-hour figure is the regulatory floor, not what cabbies actually deal with day-to-day. For airport runs specifically, most regulars book the day before or several days ahead — and across the BAT.TAXI model generally, bookings come in with at least 24 hours' notice as a matter of course. The 1-hour minimum is configurable from the backend and we may shorten it as the system matures, but in practical terms a cabbie isn't racing against a 1-hour clock — the calendar fills ahead.

Will the apps' airport algorithm undercut me? Sometimes. The apps' surge pricing tools will occasionally price below your fixed quote on a given route. But the customer who's already had a £75 fixed-price journey with you — on time, no surprises, a real person who they know by name — is rarely price-shopping against an app for the return run. The first journey is the recruitment. The second is the conversion. The third is the relationship.

Does the airport quote come with an itemised receipt? Receipts are issued by who you choose to be your approved payment provider, where the date, time, fare, drop-off fee is totalled and receipt is printed. However, the customer also has a record of the journey details on their app for expense claims. The customer gets a clean record for expense claims; you get the record TfL needs for pre-booked work compliance.

What if the passenger's flight is delayed? Built into the quote workflow. You can add the passenger's flight number, and then use your own flight tracking system to flag if the flight is delayed beyond your wait-time threshold. Most cabbies set this; some don't. Your choice; your customer relationship.

How does this differ from running my own price list on a personal business card? Two things: (1) a proper TfL-compliant pre-booking record is generated automatically — see post #4; (2) the customer relationship is tracked in your CRM — see post #3. A business card with a price list is fine for casual referral. BAT.TAXI gives you the legal and operational infrastructure to scale that.

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