Affiliate

An affiliate is another operator you trust with your customers, either by handing them your farm-outs or by running theirs. A mid-sized black-car company typically keeps a working roster of 20 to 50 affiliates across the airports and cities its accounts travel to, with a handful doing most of the volume.

The relationship runs both ways and runs on paper. Before a trip changes hands, an affiliate expects a certificate of insurance, operating authority, and an agreed net rate. In return, the sending operator expects the affiliate's chauffeur to show up in a clean vehicle of the right class, in uniform, with the passenger's name on the sign.

Affiliates are the difference between a local fleet and a national footprint. They are also the most common source of service failures, because the sending dispatcher cannot see the car. The mistake is treating the roster as a contact list rather than a set of vetted companies with expiry dates attached.

How liverybook handles it

Each affiliate record carries a tier (standard, preferred, strategic), an approval status (pending, under_review, approved, suspended, blocked) and an insurance expiry date. From those liverybook computes a compliance status and sends expiry alerts at 60, 30 and 7 days. An affiliate has contacts with roles and a driver roster with licence details, and once a trip is farmed out the affiliate's driver appears in the Sub Driver column on the run board.

Related terms

• Farm-out
• Compliance gate
• Chauffeur
• Dispatcher