More Airports Look to Collect All Entitled Fees from TNCs
U.S. based airports are becoming more sensitive to the accuracy of Transportation Network Companies’ (TNCs) fee collections. Rather than relying on TNCs to validate their own vehicle trip data, more than 25 airports of all sizes are opting to enhance their enforcement ability by installing TNC-Ops software from GateKeeper Systems.
Airports that went live with TNC-Ops in 2018 represent all sizes of airports, including Philadelphia (PHL), Austin (AUS) and Charleston (CHS) among them. In fact, fully one-third of U.S. passengers used an airport that has TNC-Ops.
“Airports understood early-on that TNCs were a phenomenon that needed to be understood and managed,” said Lynn Richardson, CEO of GateKeeper Systems. “But it’s taken awhile for everyone to really understand the complex impacts of this rapidly growing type of service.”
Several airports have used TNC-Ops reports to change the size of the area devoted to TNC passenger pick-up and TNC vehicle staging. They discovered that current locations were sufficient for the “average” hourly activity but were far-short of the space needed at the peak periods. Others use the software to respond immediately to a month with a significant variance between the detailed trip reports and the month-end payment from the TNC firm, to determine the cause of the variance and to identify any over/under payment issues.
Specifically, GateKeeper TNC-Ops receives data from the TNCs’ systems when TNC vehicles are reported on an airport’s roadway through the deployment of GPS technology. The software helps them with oversight and provides an opportunity to:
- Create TNC support data for airport invoice system
- Enhance enforcement with mobile curbside application
- Validate vehicle trip data with Trip Charge reports
- Analyze changes in GT activity and spot trends
Richardson believes that this push to enhance compliance of TNC activity and fee collection is a trend that is here stay. “There’s nothing like access to complete and accurate data to motivate airport operations to invest in software that sheds light on ways to improve ground transport efficiencies.”