Looking at the CabForce API

Our Taxi Content Hub is the place for reliable and competitively priced taxis and private rides across Europe and in New York. Soon also in other US main destinations and Asia. We enable innovative companies to create new door-to-door travel services and mobile offerings.

Interview with Tommi Holmgren, co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Cabforce.

Tommi has an extensive online business background and has been working at Amadeus before founding Cabforce.

Tell us more about Cabforce
Cabforce was founded by a group of guys who had been traveling for business and experienced the pain of getting and paying trusted taxis while abroad. Our mission is to provide a flat-rate and secure pre-bookable private rides everywhere.

What API(s) does Cabforce offer today?
The core of our service is Cabforce Taxi Content Hub, which maintains the pricing and availability of taxi and private car content across the whole Cabforce network. It’s one source for searching for rates and making the bookings. And there’s an API for these things now available to developers and travel industry partners.

When did Cabforce realized that it needed an API?
There’s a lot of hype around door-to-door travel search. To be fully capable of providing user awesome travel search results, not just from airport to airport, these companies will need to plug in content from different sources including flights, trains, ferries and ground transportation. We saw an opportunity in providing the taxi and private car content to this need. API is a natural solution for us, and it also allows us to serve partners like mobile app developers who seek to enrich their apps targeted to travelers with our content.

API is a natural solution for us, and it also allows us to serve partners like mobile app developers.

What recommendations and tips would you give to a company planning to launch an API?
We’ve been working on our platform for quite some while already with custom integrations to external systems. This gave us very good idea of the true need within the API users. It was also very beneficial for us to benchmark the other travel vertical APIs, such as train, flight and hotel to make sure we make the use of our API easy and familiar for our partners.

Why and how are you using 3scale API Management Platform today?
We needed to build our API for scalability and want to control different API plans from the beginning. We follow the ideology of not implementing anything outside of our core platform functionalities, but instead use best available services and solutions in the market to do the job.

What benefits have you seen/ are you expecting from your API program?
We’ve been receiving a lot of interest from partners after launch of our API, and the first adopters are now integrating with us already. For us, it gives us possibility to further improve our core platform instead of spending excess time working with individual point of sales integrations. We believe this will make us grow much faster!

What is your vision for your API?
Our vision is to become the biggest aggregator of taxi and private rides globally. For this to happen, we need to be able to effectively distribute our content anywhere through simple and easy to use API.