Comment: How Uber for Business cut the costs of disruption for Menzies Aviation at Sydney Airport
Christophe Peymirat, head of Uber for Business EMEA, says airlines can streamline their ground transportation needs while improving the service to customers and staff
Airport delays are getting worse. Which.co.uk found that all of the six largest airlines were less punctual in 2025 than pre-pandemic and a survey by CMAC stated that 75% of UK passengers were hit by flight delays or cancellations during 2025.
A scarcity of airport capacity is considered to be one of the main causes, made worse by airspace closures for geopolitical and environmental reasons. Delays are frustrating for travellers, but the consequences for airlines are also significant.
When long delays and late night cancellations occur, airlines face the cost of feeding and housing a plane’s worth of angry travellers – a single disruption on a busy flight can occupy hours of staff time.
One of the hardest costs to manage in this situation is the transportation of those passengers to their overnight accommodation – whether that’s their own home or a hotel. Uber for Business has been addressing this issue and is working with companies in the airline industry to take control of ground transportation costs.
One company we have helped to tackle the problem is Menzies Aviation, which provides airside services for airlines worldwide. At Sydney Airport, Menzies Aviation manages disruption for multiple airlines.
To minimise its spend on accommodation, the company’s policy when a cancellation or long delay occurs late at night is to provide hotels for passengers who do not live locally and to encourage others to return home.
Its process had been to ask passengers to arrange their own travel and to keep their receipts so that they could be reimbursed at a later date. Faced with this additional layer of administration, most passengers opted to book hotels instead.
As transport was still required to get the disrupted passengers to these locations, Menzies staff had the job not only of sourcing and allocating rooms, but of managing all the transport reimbursements later.
Physical taxi vouchers would also be provided to some passengers, but this did not solve issues with over-charging or misuse, and offered no reliable way to confirm that journeys had been to the authorised locations.
Inconsistent pricing from taxis also made it almost impossible to forecast and allocate spend for individual airlines. Moreover, the logistical challenges involved meant that the time between a plane being cancelled and the last passenger leaving the airport was averaging out at almost four hours.
The solution has been for Menzies to use the Uber for Business platform to send digital vouchers to customers instantly for taxis to their hotels or their homes.
This platform enables companies to book Uber rides for others – in the case of airlines for their crew and passengers – from a central dashboard, which can be configured to allow specific types of ride to approved destinations.
It also integrates with other expense management software, so travel costs can be tracked. The majority of customers already know and trust the Uber app so this removes another element of stress.
Individual airlines can specify their own value, time and location controls and every ride can be tracked in real time. Centralised reporting means that Menzies is able to obtain an accurate record of spend by airline, incident and cost centre.
For Menzies at Sydney Airport, the benefits have been multiple, saving airlines over £5,000 per disrupted flight on average. When offered a simple way to travel home, passengers have been happy to accept, reducing overnight stays in hotels by 62%.
The spend on rides is now visible and has reduced by almost £70 per trip for one airline. Another important improvement has been the reduction in time taken to manage the disruption. This has been halved, drastically improving the experience of disruption for both passengers and airline staff.
Delays and cancellations are an inevitable feature of air travel – even the most optimistic airline does not predict 100% punctuality any time soon. Ground transportation is one area in which airlines can streamline their processes, cut costs and give their customers the best possible experience.
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