I would like to first say that I posted this review on LimousinesOnline.Com Forums and the moderators removed the thread twice without any warning AND banned me the second time.
So we have finally decided to give Limos.com a try. After hesitating for a few years and receiving multiple calls from San Fran with the flat monthly fee rate pitch, we signed up for 1 month as a trial. I personally wanted this to work out, as I thought the platform would allow us to scale our clientele better than ever before.
After reading through the service agreement thoroughly and asking all the possible questions to the LDC sales guy I could think of, I began the setup process. I spent nearly 2 weeks filling out all of the serviced cities and their appropriate rates by vehicle group in an 80 mile radius around Chicago. I also trained my dispatchers to deal with the limos.com interface so that there would be no hiccups when we go live. In addition, we tuned our mailing system to auto keyword-search for the lead quotes and prefill the responses so as to reply to the leads as quickly as possible. All quotes were still pre-approved manually and some were rewritten to better match the service request, but overall we were very fast and efficient.
Our Deal: $2000/month
Limos.com Cut: 15% (trips under $500); 20% (trips over $500)
Limos.com CC charge: 3%
Cancellation: upon 30 day notice
As much as we all wanted for LDC to work, by day 1 of service I immediately felt mislead and quite frankly, scammed - everyone in our office was appalled. Having filled out all of the prices on their platform, I was surprised to see that the interface is returning something COMPLETELY different. I was SHOCKED when I found out that LDC's monthly operator charge and the 15% cut is not enough. In addition, they charge a 25% service fee on your entire trip!
Limos.com "Service Fee": 25%
Math:
Your Flat Rate: $50
Your Gratuity: 15% -> $7.5
Your expected trip cost: $57.5
LDC Service Fee: 25% -> 57.5*.25 = $14.375
Total Trip Cost To Customer: $50+$7.5+14.375 = $72
So after the 15% cut that LDC takes off the base rate, and an additional 3% off the whole amount, you are left with: $48.3
LDC effectively keeps 33% off trips under $500, and a whopping 38% for trips over $500
As such, LDC's pricing structure is completely tailored towards higher end corporate clients who are limited to the sedan/stretch market. In a competitive party bus/stretch SUV/weekend charter market like Chicago, you can only DREAM of getting clients off LDC because the prices for such vehicles are LUDICROUS. When we and everyone else charges $800 for a party bus in Chicago, LDC will ask for $1400. These prices are unheard of, and hence we received 0 bookings for large vehicles. For smaller vehicles, we were forced to increase the percent cut to our drivers because of how low the prices actually were in order for us to stay competitive and get any bookings at all. I varied pricing between 1st and 5th most competitive in Chicago for all of the busiest routes (ORD, MDW, Downtown Chicago), and it was extremely difficult to get volume to compensate for the LDC cut and service fee charge.
I felt misled because nowhere in the contract is the service charge revealed, and thus I assumed that the competitor prices I see on LDC are reasonable and I can compete with them.
Our Results:
Revenue: $3500
Driver Cut: $1900
After the monthly fee, we ended up with a net loss of $400! (this is NOT including office expenses, vehicle maintenance, and payroll)
To make matters worse, upon receiving our cancellation, LDC cancelled all of our future trips that we had already booked for $1800! I couldn't find such terms in the contract, but they disabled our account and cancelled all the trips. After calling them and waiting on hold for 30 minutes, I was given a BS excuse of us no longer being covered by their insurance.
So you may ask about the Leads? Perhaps we made some money back from the influx of leads? Unfortunately, most of them were complete garbage. Of the 2000 or so leads that we received and PROMPTLY answered within 5 to 20 minutes, and offered customers truly unbeatable prices with beautiful pictures of our actual fleet, we received no call backs and made 0 bookings.
Additional Problems with LDC:
- Customer Service ends the moment you sign the contract (they know your numbers and will not answer your calls promptly; waiting times have exceed an hour before)
- Rate input interface is absolute trash. It's slow, unresponsive, and is a massive burden to complete/adjust. There's no mile-from-center-point-based formulaic method that would instantly make the process 1000000x times easier. Instead, everything is manual and riddled with errors.
- Trip Rates rarely reflect the actual prices you've set. There are serious problems with the distance calculations. Some Towns are HUGE, and they take the Town as the only reference point as opposed to the actual trip location, hence causing a prices of rides between South Naperville to Chicago and North Naperville to Chicago to be exactly the same, when there's clearly a 20 mile difference.
- Pricing in general is riddled with errors and is a convoluted giant mess. It's possible to have multiple prices set for the same type of service through the shear availability of redundant trip types.
- in actuality, the best trip offers (charters, weddings packages, etc) are often last minute clients that don't fit in your schedule. I've booked most of those trips months ago for better prices and lower marketing cost via Google Adwords, etc.
- there is no interface option to decline a nonsensical trip (price-wise, location-wise, schedule-wise, etc). In order to make any such changes, you have to wait on hold for an average of 30-45 minutes.
- Because there's no cancellation/decline option, LDC will make calls to your office at 5-7am in the morning to check if indeed you will accept such trips.
- lackluster integration with LimoAnywhere. For operators who use LDC in addition to their own affiliates and marketing, it is an impossible task to make sure that the LDC schedule and your actual schedule align. LDC has no idea what your schedule is, and will send you bogus rides that waste an incredible amount of manhours to deal with.
- leads are managed directly through the LDC interface, and are NOT fully disclosed, thus creating a black-box rift between your company and the customer. You MUST use LDC email forwarding system to communicate with a potential client. You cannot directly email them or call them.
- differentiation of service is nearly impossible. Display of vehicle types and pictures is unintuitive to the customer.
- rating system is absurdly corrupt. I asked for a 5 star rating and I received it just to check the integrity of the company. None of my claims about the service were ever verified.
- placement of your company in the listings is completely nonsensical. It appears that LDC is playing favorites on who is appearing first on their results (I've done an upwards of 400 price searches to verify) as opposed to relying on a simple combination of price-point and review (it doesn't help that most companies are 5 star).
- fluid monthly pricing does not guarantee that your profit margin is safe. I've heard from other operators about sudden increases in price.
Overall, LDC is absolutely atrocious. They are a detriment to the limousine business and will most surely go the way of the dinosaur with such an unsustainable business model. LDC completely ignores the reality of a surge in competition in the transportation industry (uber, etc), and wrongly believes that their service charge of 25% has no impact on the LDC operator decision-making. With a 25% price increase off an operator's quoted price, there's simply no way to charge your regular price and still stay competitive in the market. You must STILL reduce your price so that the FINAL price that the customer pays after all the BS % fees is still competitive. As such, LDC squeezes their operators dry and discards them like dogs. There is also 0 room for weekend-only operators with party buses and stretch suvs and such in this directory - LDC can fool a corporate secretary to use LDC to book a sedan ride for her boss, but cannot fool the weekend crowd to overpay 40%+ for a poorly marketed, standardized party limousine/bus.
Do yourself a favor, and stay away from this crooked company.
Limos.com Reviews
I would like to first say that I posted this review on LimousinesOnline.Com Forums and the moderators removed the thread twice without any warning AND banned me the second time.
So we have finally decided to give Limos.com a try. After hesitating for a few years and receiving multiple calls from San Fran with the flat monthly fee rate pitch, we signed up for 1 month as a trial. I personally wanted this to work out, as I thought the platform would allow us to scale our clientele better than ever before.
After reading through the service agreement thoroughly and asking all the possible questions to the LDC sales guy I could think of, I began the setup process. I spent nearly 2 weeks filling out all of the serviced cities and their appropriate rates by vehicle group in an 80 mile radius around Chicago. I also trained my dispatchers to deal with the limos.com interface so that there would be no hiccups when we go live. In addition, we tuned our mailing system to auto keyword-search for the lead quotes and prefill the responses so as to reply to the leads as quickly as possible. All quotes were still pre-approved manually and some were rewritten to better match the service request, but overall we were very fast and efficient.
Our Deal: $2000/month
Limos.com Cut: 15% (trips under $500); 20% (trips over $500)
Limos.com CC charge: 3%
Cancellation: upon 30 day notice
As much as we all wanted for LDC to work, by day 1 of service I immediately felt mislead and quite frankly, scammed - everyone in our office was appalled. Having filled out all of the prices on their platform, I was surprised to see that the interface is returning something COMPLETELY different. I was SHOCKED when I found out that LDC's monthly operator charge and the 15% cut is not enough. In addition, they charge a 25% service fee on your entire trip!
Limos.com "Service Fee": 25%
Math:
Your Flat Rate: $50
Your Gratuity: 15% -> $7.5
Your expected trip cost: $57.5
LDC Service Fee: 25% -> 57.5*.25 = $14.375
Total Trip Cost To Customer: $50+$7.5+14.375 = $72
So after the 15% cut that LDC takes off the base rate, and an additional 3% off the whole amount, you are left with: $48.3
LDC effectively keeps 33% off trips under $500, and a whopping 38% for trips over $500
As such, LDC's pricing structure is completely tailored towards higher end corporate clients who are limited to the sedan/stretch market. In a competitive party bus/stretch SUV/weekend charter market like Chicago, you can only DREAM of getting clients off LDC because the prices for such vehicles are LUDICROUS. When we and everyone else charges $800 for a party bus in Chicago, LDC will ask for $1400. These prices are unheard of, and hence we received 0 bookings for large vehicles. For smaller vehicles, we were forced to increase the percent cut to our drivers because of how low the prices actually were in order for us to stay competitive and get any bookings at all. I varied pricing between 1st and 5th most competitive in Chicago for all of the busiest routes (ORD, MDW, Downtown Chicago), and it was extremely difficult to get volume to compensate for the LDC cut and service fee charge.
I felt misled because nowhere in the contract is the service charge revealed, and thus I assumed that the competitor prices I see on LDC are reasonable and I can compete with them.
Our Results:
Revenue: $3500
Driver Cut: $1900
After the monthly fee, we ended up with a net loss of $400! (this is NOT including office expenses, vehicle maintenance, and payroll)
To make matters worse, upon receiving our cancellation, LDC cancelled all of our future trips that we had already booked for $1800! I couldn't find such terms in the contract, but they disabled our account and cancelled all the trips. After calling them and waiting on hold for 30 minutes, I was given a BS excuse of us no longer being covered by their insurance.
So you may ask about the Leads? Perhaps we made some money back from the influx of leads? Unfortunately, most of them were complete garbage. Of the 2000 or so leads that we received and PROMPTLY answered within 5 to 20 minutes, and offered customers truly unbeatable prices with beautiful pictures of our actual fleet, we received no call backs and made 0 bookings.
Additional Problems with LDC:
- Customer Service ends the moment you sign the contract (they know your numbers and will not answer your calls promptly; waiting times have exceed an hour before)
- Rate input interface is absolute trash. It's slow, unresponsive, and is a massive burden to complete/adjust. There's no mile-from-center-point-based formulaic method that would instantly make the process 1000000x times easier. Instead, everything is manual and riddled with errors.
- Trip Rates rarely reflect the actual prices you've set. There are serious problems with the distance calculations. Some Towns are HUGE, and they take the Town as the only reference point as opposed to the actual trip location, hence causing a prices of rides between South Naperville to Chicago and North Naperville to Chicago to be exactly the same, when there's clearly a 20 mile difference.
- Pricing in general is riddled with errors and is a convoluted giant mess. It's possible to have multiple prices set for the same type of service through the shear availability of redundant trip types.
- in actuality, the best trip offers (charters, weddings packages, etc) are often last minute clients that don't fit in your schedule. I've booked most of those trips months ago for better prices and lower marketing cost via Google Adwords, etc.
- there is no interface option to decline a nonsensical trip (price-wise, location-wise, schedule-wise, etc). In order to make any such changes, you have to wait on hold for an average of 30-45 minutes.
- Because there's no cancellation/decline option, LDC will make calls to your office at 5-7am in the morning to check if indeed you will accept such trips.
- lackluster integration with LimoAnywhere. For operators who use LDC in addition to their own affiliates and marketing, it is an impossible task to make sure that the LDC schedule and your actual schedule align. LDC has no idea what your schedule is, and will send you bogus rides that waste an incredible amount of manhours to deal with.
- leads are managed directly through the LDC interface, and are NOT fully disclosed, thus creating a black-box rift between your company and the customer. You MUST use LDC email forwarding system to communicate with a potential client. You cannot directly email them or call them.
- differentiation of service is nearly impossible. Display of vehicle types and pictures is unintuitive to the customer.
- rating system is absurdly corrupt. I asked for a 5 star rating and I received it just to check the integrity of the company. None of my claims about the service were ever verified.
- placement of your company in the listings is completely nonsensical. It appears that LDC is playing favorites on who is appearing first on their results (I've done an upwards of 400 price searches to verify) as opposed to relying on a simple combination of price-point and review (it doesn't help that most companies are 5 star).
- fluid monthly pricing does not guarantee that your profit margin is safe. I've heard from other operators about sudden increases in price.
Overall, LDC is absolutely atrocious. They are a detriment to the limousine business and will most surely go the way of the dinosaur with such an unsustainable business model. LDC completely ignores the reality of a surge in competition in the transportation industry (uber, etc), and wrongly believes that their service charge of 25% has no impact on the LDC operator decision-making. With a 25% price increase off an operator's quoted price, there's simply no way to charge your regular price and still stay competitive in the market. You must STILL reduce your price so that the FINAL price that the customer pays after all the BS % fees is still competitive. As such, LDC squeezes their operators dry and discards them like dogs. There is also 0 room for weekend-only operators with party buses and stretch suvs and such in this directory - LDC can fool a corporate secretary to use LDC to book a sedan ride for her boss, but cannot fool the weekend crowd to overpay 40%+ for a poorly marketed, standardized party limousine/bus.
Do yourself a favor, and stay away from this crooked company.