Glossary

Taxi dispatch terms, explained

25 terms taxi operators meet when choosing or changing dispatch software, from automatic dispatch and white-label apps to TSE, tariff corridors and cutover, each defined in one sentence.

A

AI voice booking: Phone booking handled by an automated voice assistant that understands the caller and creates the booking without an agent.
Automatic dispatch: Dispatch in which the system assigns bookings to drivers using rules such as distance, vehicle category and priority, without a dispatcher choosing each driver.

B

Back-to-back ride: A ride offered to a driver before their current trip ends, so they can go straight from one drop-off to the next pickup.
Broadcast dispatch: A dispatch method that sends a booking to several nearby drivers at once and gives it to the first driver who accepts.

C

CDT (Centrale Database Taxivervoer): The Dutch central database for registering taxi trips, which replaces on-board computers, with the transition ending on 1 January 2028.
Corporate account: A business customer account with its own prices, users, travel rules and monthly invoicing instead of payment per ride.
Cutover: The point in a switch when the remaining operation moves to the new system and the old system is retired or kept read-only.

D

Data portability: The ability to take your data out of one system in a usable format and move it to another.
Dispatch centre (taxi central): The organisation and control room that takes taxi bookings and allocates them to drivers, often for many owner-drivers under one brand and phone number.
Dynamic pricing: Prices that change with demand, time of day or events, within the rules set by the operator and local regulation.

E

ETA (estimated time of arrival): The predicted time a taxi will reach the pickup point or the destination, ideally calculated from live traffic.

F

Fiscalisation: The legal requirement to register each sale with the tax authority, usually by issuing a fiscal receipt with a code from an approved device or system.

G

Go/no-go review: A joint decision point at the end of each stage of a switch, where the operator decides to advance, adjust or pause.

H

Hypercare: A period of intensive support straight after go-live, with daily reviews and named owners for every fix.

I

INSIKA: An earlier German standard for protecting taximeter records with a smart card, accepted until 1 January 2026 as taximeters moved to TSE.

K

Krankenfahrt (patient transport): A taxi ride to or from medical treatment in Germany that is billed to a health insurer rather than paid by the passenger.

P

Parallel running: Running the old and new dispatch systems at the same time during a switch, with clear rules for which bookings and drivers each handles.
Pre-booked ride: A taxi ride booked in advance for a set time, such as an airport transfer, hospital appointment or business trip.
Private hire (Mietwagen): Pre-booked passenger transport by licensed vehicles that, unlike taxis, cannot be hailed in the street or wait at taxi ranks.

S

Shared taxi app: A single consumer app that sends bookings to many independent taxi centrals, such as taxi.eu or Taxi Deutschland.

T

Tariff corridor: A price range set by a city around the official taxi tariff, within which operators may offer fixed prices for pre-booked rides.
Taxi dispatch software: Software that takes taxi bookings from every channel, assigns each one to a suitable driver and tracks the trip until payment.
Taximeter: A certified device or app that calculates the fare from distance and time according to the official tariff.
TSE (technical security device): The certified security module that German cash systems, including taximeters since 2024, use to record transactions so they cannot be altered.

W

White-label taxi app: A passenger or driver app built on a software provider's platform but published under the taxi operator's own name and brand.