Herman Heunes | General Manager | Corporate Traveller | mail me |
E-hailing, for most South African businesses, has become the default mode of getting employees from A to B. After all, there are no invoicing headaches or petrol reimbursements to worry about. Your employee simply opens the app, books the ride, and gets on with their day.
That familiarity, however, has been complicated by a regulatory shake-up that caught many businesses off guard.
The evolving e-hailing regulatory landscape
Under South Africa’s National Land Transport Act, which came into effect in September 2025, e-hailing platforms had to register with the National Public Transport Regulator within 180 days. While some platforms met that deadline, others did not. In the North West, police have already begun impounding vehicles belonging to unregistered operators.
South Africa’s evolving e-hailing regulatory landscape has raised a question that most businesses haven’t had to ask before: do we actually know what’s happening once an employee gets into that car? The honest answer, for many Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), is no.
That gap has nothing to do with e-hailing being the wrong choice and everything to do with the fact that governance hasn’t kept pace with convenience. The good news? Closing the gap is simpler than most businesses think.
The managed travel illusion
E-hailing entered South Africa’s corporate travel landscape and immediately made itself indispensable. It offers real-time tracking, digital receipts, cashless payments and a rating system that creates at least some accountability between driver and passenger.
As part of a broader managed travel programme, it sits alongside chauffeur transfers, hotel bookings and flight management. In this context, it’s a powerful tool. However, when businesses use it in isolation, without policy or oversight, it looks and largely feels like a managed solution.
The problem is that looking like managed travel and being managed travel are two different things. South Africa’s new e-hailing regulations have made a previously invisible assumption very visible, very quickly. The resulting e-hailing crackdown has also highlighted the importance of understanding which providers operate within the regulatory framework.
Visibility is the biggest challenge we see with SMEs and e-hailing. If companies don’t know how employees are moving around, they can’t effectively support them when things go wrong. That’s a policy problem. The tools to create that visibility already exist. Most businesses just haven’t connected them to a formal framework yet.
– Carmen Hidalgo, Customer Success Team Leader at Corporate Traveller South Africa
The myth around SMEs and duty of care
There’s a persistent assumption in the SME market that duty of care is something multinationals worry about. For smaller businesses, the thinking often goes, the informal approach has worked fine so far.
However, duty of care ultimately depends on an employer’s responsibility, not the size of its travel programme. When an employee travels for work, the employer must take reasonable steps to keep them safe and support them if something goes wrong. This applies whether they’re flying to Johannesburg or taking an e-hailing vehicle to a client meeting across town.
Liability may sit with multiple parties in a ground transport incident, but responsibility cannot be outsourced. What we want SMEs to understand is this: building a duty of care framework that properly supports your travellers doesn’t require complexity. It requires clarity. Clear guidelines, approved providers, and a defined process for escalation. That’s achievable for any business, regardless of size, and it changes the experience for your travellers and your risk profile significantly.
The shift is already visible in how our clients approach ground transport. We’re seeing companies move from convenience-led bookings to visibility-led bookings. The question used to be ‘how do we get a ride?’ Now it’s ‘how do we manage the journey?’
That change reflects a growing understanding that e-hailing is no longer simply a transport choice. It’s a traveller experience, a business risk and a duty of care decision, all at once. So, what does that actually look like in practice?
What good looks like
Sensible e-hailing governance for an SME requires a few deliberate decisions, applied consistently. The recent e-hailing crackdown makes these measures particularly relevant for businesses that rely on ride-hailing services for employee transport.
-
Start with an approved provider list
Knowing which platforms operate within the legal framework is a reasonable baseline. That list may evolve, and a good Travel Management Company (TMC) will help you stay current. Nevertheless, maintaining an approved list puts your business ahead of most SMEs.
-
Build basic safety guidelines into your travel culture
When using e-hailing services, encourage employees to conduct the following safety checks:
-
- Verify the vehicle registration, make, and model against the app before getting in.
- Confirm that the driver matches the photograph.
- Never accept a different vehicle based on the driver’s say-so.
- Keep the trip inside the app. If a driver asks you to cancel the booking and pay directly, decline.
-
Define what visibility means for your business
This doesn’t have to mean real-time GPS monitoring of every employee. Instead, it might involve asking travelling employees to share their trip details with a colleague. Alternatively, businesses can require employees to book through a platform that generates reportable data. The goal is simple: if something goes wrong, you know where your people are and have a process for responding.
-
Create a simple escalation path
Who does an employee call if their driver doesn’t match the app or they feel unsafe? If the answer is “I suppose they’d call their manager,” that’s a starting point. However, you should document the process, communicate it to employees, and test it.
-
Treat e-hailing as part of your travel policy, not an exception to it
If employees are already using it, it belongs in the policy. Ignoring it doesn’t reduce the risk. It just means you’re managing it without a framework. The businesses that have taken the time to include ground transport in their travel governance tell us the same thing: it’s one of the easiest wins in the whole travel programme. A few clear decisions, and suddenly you have visibility and accountability where you previously had none.
The regulatory framework will settle, and the industry will find its footing under the new rules. However, the underlying question remains: do we actually know what’s happening once an employee gets into that car?
In conclusion
E-hailing remains the right choice for most SMEs. It’s cost-effective and accessible. When it works well, it supports the lean, efficient travel programme that smaller businesses need.
We know SMEs aren’t interested in replacing it with something more expensive and more complicated. The goal is to make sure the governance is as good as the convenience,” comments Heunes.
That’s a realistic ambition. For SMEs that haven’t started yet, the distance between where they are and where they need to be is shorter than they think. Good travel governance doesn’t need to be complicated. It just needs to exist.