Don’t Travel Empty

Cost

The cost of using the full DTE system, referred to as ‘enhanced membership’ is an up front registration fee of £150 and thereafter £30 a month. If you cease monthly membership and rejoin you have to reregister. Since April, standard membership has been free for one month after which operators have to either become an enhanced member or cease being a member. As a standard member you get the benefits of the ability to post jobs on Don’t Travel Empty, post advertisements on the homepage for passenger recovery and find available drivers but not the enhanced membership benefits of: free 24 hour crisis control, automated job matches, texts and emails to operators for recovery (though this is a chargeable service), access to member’s contact details and finally, priority email and text alerts in advance of standard members.

Other developments

Run to date from Anthony Marrett’s field study centre at Aylmerton in Norfolk, Don’t Travel Empty now has its own head office at Oak Lodge, Little Melton near Norwich. This is next door to the premises of Connected World, run by Fred Cohen who has a shareholding in DTE and is responsible for the development of the programmes behind the system. There’s a new telephone number too, which is 0845 548 5003.

Don’t Travel Empty now has its first employee, as opposed to shareholder involved in the business. Based at Aylmerton, Wendy Coe handles administration and tasks such as sending out texts when required.

Also new is Bob Talbot, who has taken on the position of Customer Service Manager and ‘has proved to us that the product is eminently saleable.’ He visits basic members to explain all the benefits of enhanced membership an has sold 70 enhanced memberships since he joined in February. It is Anthony’s intention that in time there will be between five and ten Customer Service Managers signing up new members and looking after existing ones.

It is the intention that the next employee taken on will be an appointments booker to maximise Bob’s effectiveness.

At Coach and Bus Live, it was good to meet James Howells, who has been with DTE since day one of the project. Anthony said of him, ‘We wouldn’t be here without his knowledge of websites and his enthusiasm. He is the best motivator I have ever met.’

On an operational note, Anthony has noted that since the Driver CPC became fully operational, there has been a difference with more people short of drivers and looking for help covering work. He estimates that this may mean an extra 30-40% of enquiries for agency drivers next year and says ‘we deal with several good ones.’

Future

Asked how he sees DTE developing? He said, ‘we think the Manage part of the site will appeal to a lot of operators and is worth exploiting. We really genuinely want operators to use it and get used to using a management system, prior to moving to a proprietary system that offers more features to help them maximise their effectiveness as their business grows.’

‘We are signing up an average of five new members every week and I think, realistically, there is no reason why we shouldn’t achieve 2,000 members, which is approximately half of the active coach operators in the UK. We’re never going to get 100%, no business ever does. I think we could encourage half of that 2,000 to be enhanced members, because enhanced membership now gives you Europe’s largest coach membership scheme. We’ve had £5m of work go through the site from end users. Anyone that uses coaches en masse sees DTE as a useful tool. We expect £10m to go through next year.’

Enhanced members also get primary alerts on all available work that comes through.

Anthony has said in the past how important he thinks it is that operators have a strong web presence with so much business being done in this way today. To this end, DTE is offering to build and host cost effective websites for operators, which can include a jobs entry feature to make it easier to handle quotations. Also under consideration is offering a divert facility to answer telephone calls that an operator cannot answer themselves.

Last word

It is make or break time for DTE, because the latest developments have the potential to ensure the information on empty legs and available vehicles is readily available in a way that the company has struggled to ensure hitherto. It’s part of a useful package of options that DTE is offering and one that has grown in its scope every time I have met Anthony.

Operators are signing up; East Yorkshire Motor Services contacted the office and did so during my interview with Anthony.

By Stuart Jones