Every taxi fleet owner knows the pain: you have fifty cars out, yet on a busy Friday night some are sitting empty while customers in another zone are quoted twenty minutes. That is rarely a driver problem. More often, it is a dispatch setup problem — and how your rules are configured matters as much as which system you chose.
Autocab (Ghost): built for customisation
Autocab’s strength is how deeply it can be tailored. Zones, priorities and backup rules can be shaped around how your firm actually works — for example, setting zone backups so that when one zone runs dry, the nearest available driver from the next zone is offered the job instead of the booking waiting. Firms with complex school, account and airport work often value that flexibility most.
iCabbi: built for automation
iCabbi’s strength is its automation. Its dispatch engine allocates work quickly and consistently, which suits firms that want the system to make the routine decisions at speed. The watch-out is the same as with any automation: left entirely to itself, an algorithm will happily send a driver a long way for a short job, because it follows the rules it was given rather than the situation on the ground.
So which is better?
Honestly? Both are capable professional systems, and most firms get more from setting up the one they have properly than from switching. The questions that decide your results are practical ones: Are your zones drawn around real demand? Do backup rules kick in when a zone empties? Does anyone watch the screen at peak and step in when the rules produce a silly outcome — a road closure the system doesn’t know about, a driver finishing a shift, an account customer who needs care rather than speed?
Where a human still earns their place
That watching brief is the human element. Software follows rules; a good controller reads the night. Our dispatch support operators work inside both systems — setting the routine work to run automatically, monitoring the screen, and intervening when the algorithm gets it wrong, so drivers spend less time running empty and passengers wait less.
If you want to see that working on your own fleet rather than read about it, our operators cover Autocab and iCabbi (and Cordic too) from £4 per hour — and a 7-day free trial puts them on your system, on your real work, before you pay anything.
