Gett Simplifies and Elevates Business Ground Travel

"We use PubNub because powering real-time updates and signaling is not our domain. Using PubNub lets us focus on our expertise.” Yaki Zakai, CTO at Gett

Meet Gett 

Gett is a Tel-Aviv based transportation company dedicated to simplifying business ground travel. “Our mission is to provide the best mobility platform for enterprises,” said Yaki Zakai, CTO of Gett. “Our platform is an end-to-end solution that gives customers a single place to manage business travel using their choice of ground transportation services.” To deliver on this promise, Gett offers dedicated apps for riders and drivers, as well as a web-based portal for company admins and employees to manage their travel plans.

Through its portal and dedicated rider app, Gett lets its customers easily book and manage rides with any of Gett’s transportation partners, or with their own preferred service. “We make it easy for businesses to book any trip in one place, without the need for companies to manage separate vendors. Employees get to travel exactly how they want, without any extra work on their part,” said Zakai.  

For drivers, Gett’s dedicated driver app offers a single place to receive requests from its multiple integrated services. “Rather than hop between rideshare apps, drivers have a single home with Gett,” said Zakai. Beyond giving drivers a unified workspace, Gett supports their drivers, helping them resolve problems like declined cards or vehicle damage.

To serve both riders and drivers, Gett must satisfy the high demands brought by enterprise customers for a refined, seamless experience, and they must serve as a viable partner for their drivers. To deliver the instantaneous, reliable, and trustworthy experience that all their customers require, Gett turned to PubNub.

Using real-time updates to deliver a seamless and trustworthy experience

When he began building Gett’s rider-facing app in 2012, lead developer Pavel Krayzman knew that, to earn his riders’ trust, it was critical to keep them consistently updated on time-sensitive information like the status of ride requests, driver arrival times, and payments. 

Before partnering with PubNub, Gett achieved this by syncing each rider with their backend server every few seconds. While these periodic updates were simple for Krayzman’s team to implement and maintain, they didn’t give riders the results they needed. “Riders would have to wait for five to 10 seconds before getting an update on their driver’s status, or for their payment to complete,” he said. “This was not kind of the experience that we wanted to give our customers.” 

The team quickly saw that this delay in updates and processing would negatively impact both riders and drivers. “These delays really converted to lost money,” said Krayzman. “When a driver accepts an order, it’s important for customers to see that a driver is coming as soon as possible, otherwise, they will cancel,” he said. “That driver will lose out on that trip, and the rider has to spend time rebooking their travel.” For Krayzman and his team, these real-time insights were not simply a nice-to-have, but were a crucial part of making their app work for riders and drivers alike. 

Gett knew they needed a way to keep all clients in sync with no delays, loss of information, or lapses in security. After evaluating multiple solutions, Krayzman found PubNub. 

Krayzman was able to replace his original syncing logic with PubNub overnight, bringing the original 10-15 second lag between updates down to a matter of milliseconds. “PubNub was plug-and-play, basically,” said Krayzman. “Once we started, it just worked, and implementing it into the rider app immediately smoothed out the lag we had seen in the rider experience.” With PubNub, Gett can now easily and instantly handle time-sensitive tasks, like notifying riders that their ride is on time, verifying credit card charges, and accurately displaying final receipts, that are vital to building trust and delivering a seamless travel experience.

And, as Gett looked to expand its driver-side services, Krayzman knew from the start that their driver app would also need these real-time updates. “With drivers, the ability to react fast also converts to money,” he said. “With PubNub, we now have the ability to sync all drivers the instant an order is made or claimed.” This means that Gett’s drivers can see exactly which ride requests are available at any moment, from any service. With this speed and visibility, Gett gives its drivers the autonomy, freedom, and broad choice of routes necessary for consistent, rewarding work.

 For all its users, real-time updates are key for Gett to deliver an effective, reliable experience. “For both the driver and the rider, there is an expectation for immediate acknowledgment,” says CTO Yaki Zakai. “When a customer requests a ride, they want to immediately understand that it’s been seen and accepted.” The same goes for drivers. “With PubNub, Gett can let all its users know that the entire flow, end-to-end, is working smoothly.”

“PubNub was plug-and-play...Once we started, it just worked, and implementing it into the rider app immediately smoothed out the lag we had seen in the rider experience.”

Instilling long-term confidence for enterprise teams

For Gett’s enterprise customers, this reliable, real-time experience plays a major role in securing Gett as their chosen long-term partner for critical business travel. For these customers, Gett’s rider app and admin portal must meet high expectations for the consistency and ease of booking, managing, and carrying out travel arrangements.

“As business travelers, our customers expect an effortless, seamless experience, and PubNub’s real-time updates allow Gett to deliver an experience that meets this expectation,” Zakai said. This means that admins, or individual employees, can easily plan, book, ride, and pay for their trips, with the visibility to know that everything is going according to plan at any stage.

Krayzman cites the reliability and speed of PubNub as a key factor in achieving this goal and winning the confidence of their enterprise customers. “For admins, once a ride is scheduled, they know that it will happen and that it will happen on time,” said Krayzman. “It just works, and even without checking the platform, admins can be confident that everything is working.” 

Through real-time updates, Gett gives business travelers an effortless experience beyond what they expect, making travel easy and giving everybody on their team the confidence that they’ll arrive at their destination with no hiccups or delays. And, by simplifying the complex process of travel planning and delivering a seamless, reliable experience, Gett earns its place as a trusted partner for all their customers’ travel needs.

Decreasing development time for Gett’s developers

For Krayzman and his team, building their key real-time updates with PubNub has been fast and effortless from the beginning. “For me as a developer, PubNub is something that just works,” he said. “Not every service is like this, and this is something I think is a real benefit for developers.” And, because PubNub powers a core part of Gett’s apps, it’s important that it works well without requiring maintenance as the codebase evolves. “With PubNub, you don’t need to deal with too much complexity—you add the SDK, a few calls, and you’re good to go.”

For Gett’s developers, the agility and reliability of PubNub means that they can develop features quickly, then count on those features to keep working—even years down the line. “We have been able to use PubNub for years without any serious rearchitecting or updating,” says Dani Konstantinovski, who runs global tech support for Gett. “We haven’t had to open a support ticket with PubNub in years.” 

In fact, Konstantinovski cites PubNub’s quality and reliability as a major factor in their decision to rely on it as a central part of their platform, rather than building their own real-time functionality from scratch. “If we created a system in-house that would have the same SLA, availability, and speed as PubNub, it would be an enormous cost in development time, effort, and maintenance—that’s why we trust PubNub.” 

Instead, using PubNub frees Gett’s developers to focus on developing the features and functionality that make their app unique and useful for their customers. “We use PubNub because powering real-time updates and signaling is not our domain,” says CTO Zakai. “Using PubNub lets us focus on our expertise.”

“With PubNub, we’re confident that Gett is not limited to how many riders, drivers, or orders we can support.” 

Effortlessly scaling Gett’s platform to support rapid growth

Gett first partnered with PubNub in 2012, and since then they’ve grown to solve the transportation needs of business travelers around the world. As Gett’s business has grown, they’ve found that one of the major benefits of PubNub is its ability to scale effortlessly to support their success. 

“When we started using PubNub, we were at about 1,000 rides per month,” said Konstantinovsky. “Today we host millions of rides a month. And, we did it without even thinking about problems related to the scale of our communications,” he said. This reliability at scale means that Gett’s systems are easy for Konstantinovsky and his team to operate and maintain, even with a growing user base and increasing demands on their platform. “If PubNub went down, we would suffer quite a bit,” he said. “But, that hasn’t happened, thanks to PubNub’s five-nines of availability.”

For CTO Yaki Zekai, it’s hard to overstate the value of a system that performs as expected, without outages or the need for maintenance. “Given the amount of traffic, and the amount of data we send over PubNub, stability and availability of the service is key,” he said. “With PubNub, I know that our platform is supported automatically, without thinking about it.” 

And while Gett has enjoyed considerable growth so far, they’re even more excited about their potential to expand even further in the future. With PubNub, Zakai and his team feel confident that they have a tech stack that is scalable and reliable to handle any amount of traffic, even as they grow to serve more riders in new markets. “We know we will be able to support any scale that we have,” said Zakai. “With PubNub, we’re confident that Gett is not limited to how many riders, drivers, or orders we can support.” 

Conclusion

In PubNub, Gett has found a partner that lets them execute on their vision for a seamless, responsive, and trustworthy business travel experience that exceeds the expectations of their enterprise customers. With PubNub, Gett can effortlessly serve both its global fleet of drivers and the millions of business trips that they provide, without a limit for future growth. If you’re looking to create a seamless, trustworthy travel experience that gets your customers where they need to go, reach out to our sales team, to learn more about PubNub for rideshare and delivery.