Uber + VivaTech: improving event attendee experiences through innovation

VivaTech is a globally recognised technology event for startups and leaders to celebrate innovation. More than 100,000 attendees from around the world go to Paris every May to hear top speakers, see new innovation launches, and enjoy live experiences. To guarantee success in 2018, VivaTech needed to ensure that its visitors and employees could get to and from the event quickly—and with minimal fuss.

It was especially important that VivaTech’s numerous high-profile guests could get around Paris quickly, which isn’t easy when all these visitors are in town. So VivaTech turned to Uber for Business. VivaTech partnered with John Paul, a top concierge service in Paris, to use Uber Central to coordinate rides for 100-plus VIPs. The elevated service meant VivaTech could get speakers to their venues on time in a convenient and scalable way.

Demonstrating its spirit of innovation, VivaTech conducted research into the previous year’s traffic around the event in Porte de Versailles as the team sought to improve transportation flow for all attendees. By using Uber for Business, VivaTech could select specific pick-up and drop-off points at optimal locations to keep journeys away from likely traffic jams.

“We also took it a step further by adding markings on the ground to guide our visitors when exiting the event,” explains Nicolas Douchement, head of operations at VivaTech.

To encourage attendees to test VivaTech’s new strategy, the event team distributed a discount code for rides with Uber to and from the venue. Not only did attendees’ transportation flow improve with the changes, but also attendees were happy with the perk—and usage suggests that they preferred it. “Uber for Business has allowed us to streamline access to our event.” says Douchement. “We found 4 times more rides from or to our event compared to the previous year.”

To help make the event go smoothly, VivaTech needed to provide transportation to its employees as well. The company’s Uber for Business account is set up so that when VivaTech team members switch to their business profile, they can request rides with Uber and have the cost automatically synced to the company account. This gives VivaTech’s travel team visibility into all the trips taken (the route, time, employee, and cost) and allows its admins to set key policies (such as time of day to ride or type of vehicle). Meanwhile, employees save time on expensing, as VivaTech’s central credit card automatically pays for every trip.

Says Douchement: “We want to provide a fluid and effortless ground transportation solution to our visitors and staff during our event.” With Uber for Business, VivaTech’s team delivered a smooth ride experience for every group it needed to move.