Addison Lee ready to ‘lock horns’ with rival Uber

“For us it’s the start of the journey and a really interesting place,” he said. “With people like Uber, our view is bring them on in a good way.

“They are a slightly different business to us; we have a lot of corporate clients and we execute at a different service level, but the good thing for us is that everybody is excited because it’s shaking up and disrupting the category and it will keep us on our toes. There’s enough [of the industry] for everybody and we’re excited to lock horns with them and see what we can do.”

Constantinou revealed that Addison Lee is looking to capitalise on the services it already offers, such as parcel deliveries, but to package and communicate them to consumers in the way that Uber has already done with its delivery service Uber Rush.

“The irony about things like Uber Rush is that we actually did some research and discovered that we’ve been delivering about 500 packages a week through our cars,” he said.

“Now we haven’t packaged it up as ‘Ad Lee Speed’ but it’s a good learning for the business – it’s almost too shy and humble in packaging and promoting ourselves in the right way.”

As a result of this insight the company is gearing up to communicate a series of different offerings come the new year, but Constantinou stressed that all of Addison Lee’s innovations will be led by the demands and needs of its consumers.

“Are we going to move into delivery of packages across London? We do that already, we have a career in transport service, but is that something we are going to aggressively look at? It depends what consumers want.

“We’ll create products and services that people genuinely want in their lives, and that’s going to make their lives easier.”

Opportunities to expand internationally are afoot, with New York earmarked as the first imprint in North America. Currently Addison Lee operates in 350 cities, however London is the only city to carry the Addison Lee brand on its cars – other markets operate with “trusted” partners.

However, Constantinou said that in New York it would work “from the ground up” and will place the Addison Lee brand “front and centre”, alongside eyeing up opportunities in Asia.

“We’ve talked about having hubs of activity globally, but I think from a North America point of view the East Coast and New York is an obvious choice, especially when a client is asking you to be there too.

“It’s a bit of a no brainer to start in that space – I think we will then look for a hub in the Asian part of the world as well and it’s a journey we will go on; but we’re keen to do it at the right pace because we want to maintain our product quality, because that differentiates us from a lot of our competitors.”

In that vein, Constantinou teasingly swiped at Uber and added that Addison Lee is in the positon to offer a “more premium service”, because it owns the vehicles within the company and trains all staff that it employs. He was keen to stress however, that while the service is predominately known for its corporate clientele it is still accessible to everyone, with personal journeys accounting for 60 per cent of the business.

“We have lots of experience in the personal journey space,” he said. “So for us it’s about packaging up our strengths and making sure in market that people understand they can pre-book cars, drivers respect their privacy and we offer fixed prices. Those are the kind of messages they are seeing in the campaign at the moment.”

Constantinou added that in-car technology is an area Addison Lee is currently investigating, with a project in its early stages currently active to see how the company can configure the experience in cars for its consumers.