Every channel a booking arrives on
Work does not arrive through one door. It arrives on your website at 09:00, on WhatsApp at 22:40, as a forwarded itinerary from a hotel concierge, as an Instagram DM from someone who found your photos, and as a phone call from a regular who has never once used the form. Most operators end up running a different process for each.
RideDesk treats every one of those as the same thing: a booking that needs pricing, dispatching and settling. The channel decides how the conversation starts. It does not get to invent its own pricing, its own confirmation email or its own place to live.
The problem is fragmentation, not volume
Ten bookings a day is not hard. Ten bookings a day spread across a website inbox, two phones, a shared WhatsApp, a Facebook page nobody checks and a marketplace portal is hard — because the difficulty is not the work, it is holding five half-finished conversations in your head while driving or dispatching.
Every channel you add without consolidating multiplies the ways a job can be dropped. The double-booking almost never comes from the busy channel; it comes from the quiet one somebody forgot to check.
So the goal is not to be on more channels. It is for every channel to end in the same record, priced by the same rate card, with the same confirmation going out to the customer — so adding a channel adds reach without adding process.
The job, as your dispatcher sees it
One record holds the passenger, the route, the flight, the assigned driver and the money — so nothing about the ride lives in somebody’s phone.
Airport transfer · today
M. Weber · 2 pax
Frankfurt Airport (FRA) · T1
Hotel Jumeirah, Thurn-und-Taxis-Platz
Thomas S.
Accepted · 4 min ago
Every way work reaches you
Website, widget, WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger, Telegram, live chat, email, phone and marketplace partners — all landing in the same place.
The channels RideDesk answers
Each of these creates or updates a real booking. None of them is a separate inbox you have to remember to open.
Your website
Either the embeddable booking widget — an iframe you paste into any site, with address autocomplete, a route map and live prices — or a direct API call from a form your developer built. Both hit the same quote engine, so a hand-built funnel and the widget cannot disagree about price.
WordPress, without a developer
A plugin with a shortcode and a Gutenberg block, plus a Contact Form 7 bridge that forwards submissions from a contact form you already have. It also injects first-touch attribution on every page, so you learn which campaign produced the booking rather than logging it as "direct".
WhatsApp
Your own WhatsApp Business number, with the full thread visible on the booking. Inside the 24-hour window staff reply freely with text, photos, documents and voice notes; outside it, a reply is converted to an approved template automatically, so a message never silently fails to deliver.
Instagram and Messenger DMs
Both networks land in one inbox at /admin/messages. Because a DM gives you a display name and no email, staff capture the contact on the thread — and that is what turns the conversation into a booking, a rental or a follow-up task without retyping anything.
A chat bot that actually books
A guided bot that greets by name, offers a menu, and walks a customer through a real booking — on WhatsApp, on your website, or on your own Telegram bot. It never invents a price: it calls the same quote engine your website does, then hands over to a human for anything a flow does not cover.
Live chat on your booking pages
See who is on the site right now, and offer a time-limited discount code to a visitor who is hesitating on the price step. The chat can auto-reply from your own business facts, and a member of staff can take over mid-conversation.
Phone calls, typed once
The call is the oldest channel and it is not going away. Manual booking gets the full pipeline — line items, VAT, a quote valid-until date — and if the customer emailed or messaged you an itinerary, pasting the raw text drafts the whole booking for you to check.
Marketplaces and partners
Rides sourced from a marketplace are dispatch jobs, not customer relationships: the supplier owns the passenger. RideDesk models that explicitly — no customer emails, no payment card, no invoice — while your own partner network gets a portal to submit vehicles, drivers and documents for approval.
AI assistants
A per-tenant MCP endpoint lets an AI assistant get a quote and place a booking against your rate card, with OAuth for consumer chat apps. An agent can never set a price — the money always comes from a stored quote.
Priced by your rate card, on the server
The route is measured once and every vehicle class is priced from your own rates, so no channel can quietly undercut you.
Priced live from your own rate card · fixed, no surprises
A payment page per booking
Your own Stripe, PayPal or SumUp account, the full booking summary on the page, and a compliant invoice behind it.
One rule holds all of this together
No channel prices its own work. The website, the widget, the bot, the AI agent and your own staff all call the same server-side quote engine, which measures the route once and prices every vehicle class from your rate card. That is why adding a channel cannot quietly undercut you.
Rentals, with the paperwork attached
Day rates and duration discounts, included kilometres, condition at handover and return, and an agreement the customer signs.
4 d
Period
€ 149/d
Rate
−10%
Long-stay
Your brand, your domain
Your colours, your logo and your sending address, on a hostname you own. Customers never learn what software you run.
Booking page, panel & emails — 100% your brand, none of ours
What happens after the message arrives
Identical for every channel above — which is the entire point.
- 1
It becomes a booking record
One row, with the pickup, the passenger, the price and the source it came from. The conversation stays attached to it, so the WhatsApp thread or the DM is on the job rather than in a phone.
- 2
The price is verified
The figure is recomputed from your own rate card and compared. A mismatch never rejects the customer — it holds the booking as pending with the reason attached and asks a human.
- 3
Attribution is captured properly
First touch on arrival, not at submit: the campaign that brought them, the pages they visited, the page they booked from. Read at submit time, the UTM is long gone and every paid visit reports as direct.
- 4
The customer hears one version
One confirmation, in their language, from your address — regardless of whether they came from Instagram or a phone call.
How a booking moves
Arrive, get priced, get a driver, get confirmed, get paid — the same path whichever channel it came from.
Sign up & make it yours
Create your organization, set your rate card, connect your domain and drop in your logo and colour.
Take bookings everywhere
Point your website at RideDesk, plug in the API, forward marketplace jobs, or add them by hand.
Dispatch & get paid
Approve, assign a driver or partner, send the pay link, and let the automations handle the rest.
What comes with it
The capabilities that turn a booking list into a business you can run from one screen.
Built-in CRM
Every booker becomes a customer record — history, documents, billing details, lifetime value.
Two-way inbox & WhatsApp
Reply to customers by email or WhatsApp from inside each booking. No separate app.
Live flight status
Airport pickups track the flight automatically — delays surface before the driver leaves.
Bookable by AI agents
A per-tenant MCP endpoint lets AI assistants get a quote and book — priced by your rules, never theirs.
Quote-to-booking analytics
See what visitors entered, which class they picked, and where they dropped off the funnel.
Automations & reminders
Confirmations, driver reminders, payment chasers and a morning digest — on autopilot.
Worth knowing before you switch a channel on
Honest constraints, so nothing here is a surprise after you buy.
WhatsApp needs your own number
Customer and driver messages always ride your own WhatsApp Business account, never a shared RideDesk number. That is deliberate: one shared number would put every business on one quality rating and one messaging limit. Staff alerts can use ours.
The 24-hour window is Meta's rule, not ours
Outside 24 hours from the customer's last message, only an approved template can be delivered. RideDesk handles the conversion for you and tells you it did, but no software can remove the rule.
Instagram DMs need a Business account on a Facebook Page
Both networks are one connection, and the Instagram account has to be linked to the Page. If you link it afterwards, re-check the Page to pick it up.
Marketplace integrations vary
Some suppliers publish an API and some do not. Where there is no API, email ingestion is the fallback — and it is worth asking any vendor which suppliers they genuinely connect to rather than merely list.
Some channels are add-ons
WhatsApp buys the channel, the chat bot is separate because it also runs on your website and Telegram, and live visitors is its own module. You are not paying for channels you do not use.
Frequently asked questions
Do I have to use all of these?
No, and you should not. Most operators run their website and one messaging channel, and add a third only when customers keep asking for it. Every channel is switched on individually, and the ones you leave off are invisible in the panel.
Can I keep my existing website?
Yes. The widget is an iframe that drops into any site including WordPress, and there is a documented API for a custom build. Changing dispatch software should not mean rebuilding your website.
What happens to a WhatsApp message when nobody is at the desk?
It lands in the thread and, if you have the chat bot, the bot can carry the conversation — including taking a real booking through the quote engine. Anything it cannot handle becomes a hand-off with a note, rather than silence until morning.
Will bookings from Instagram have a customer email?
Not automatically — Meta gives you a display name and an account ID, not an email. Staff capture the contact on the thread and that prefills the booking. It is deliberately not parsed out of the chat text: a wrong email on a booking is worse than no email.
Does the chat bot ever quote a price it made up?
No. The bot calls the same quote engine as your website and can only repeat what it returns. The same applies to the AI auto-reply on live chat, which is instructed to never state a price or promise a discount.
Can a booking be taken over the phone and still get everything else?
Yes. A manually created booking gets the same confirmation, payment link, invoice numbering and reminders as one from the website. The only difference is who typed it.
How do I know which channel is actually producing work?
Every booking stores its source, and quotes carry full attribution — campaign, referrer, landing page, device — with booked-conversion tracking. That answers "is the widget worth it" with data rather than impressions.