London Heathrow Cars: Rebuilding after Covid, with the boring fixes first.
Live, ongoing engagement — every figure is labelled either verified & shipped or a target we’re tracking toward. We don’t blur the two.
The Business
London Heathrow Cars is a private hire and airport transfer operator with over 20 years of history serving Heathrow and Greater London. Covid collapsed UK air passenger numbers by over 80% in 2020 — for a business entirely dependent on flights, that meant an 18-month effective shutdown. LHC survived. By 2026 the challenge had changed: recovery isn’t growth, and the private hire market had moved on — aggregator apps had share, customer expectations had shifted, and LHC’s digital presence hadn’t kept pace with the quality of its actual service.
“We went from a stable, growing operation to effectively zero revenue in a matter of weeks. No flights. No bookings. No income.”
What We Actually Did First
We didn’t open with a chatbot pitch. The first weeks were spent on the unglamorous parts of the funnel — because a beautiful AI system sitting on top of a broken booking form doesn’t generate revenue, it just automates the leak.
Cordic booking-logic audit
Reviewed how the booking platform’s pricing and payment logic actually behaves before building anything on top.
GSC verified, 90-day SEO strategy shipped, live fixes published same day
Home & About titles, meta descriptions and a missing H1 bug fixed and published to production — not just documented. Baseline: 520 clicks · 104K impressions · pos 20.5 · 0.5% CTR
Oversized address dropdown — reported 13:37, fixed & live same day
Root cause traced to unstyled heading tags in the booking script inheriting site-wide font sizes. Fixed inside the site-wide component so it can’t silently break again. Four customer-facing defects resolved this week alone.
AI chatbot decision brief delivered
Built and demoed a working AI concierge with one-tap WhatsApp handover before asking LHC to spend a penny on it.
The Chatbot: Built to Launch Free, Upgrade Only When It Earns It
Rather than recommend a subscription chat platform, we built LHC’s website assistant in-house. It launches at £0/month — no platform fees, our own code, hosted through their existing Webflow setup — using guided quick-reply buttons and a one-tap “Chat on WhatsApp” handover that pre-fills the conversation topic so customers never repeat themselves.
Free to launch and run. The only future cost is optional: switching on the Claude AI engine once usage data shows it’s worth it. No contract, cancel anytime, no per-seat fees. LHC owns the code, the data, and the customer relationship.
Rising with volume or seats. Free tiers cap at ~50 conversations. Conversations and customer data live inside a vendor’s platform, not the client’s.
The decision framework we gave LHC’s leadership was explicit: launch free, measure every conversation and every WhatsApp handover in GA4 for 2–4 weeks, then decide with data whether the ~£10–15/month AI upgrade is justified. At LHC’s average fare of £45–60, a single extra booking covers three to four months of that cost.
Where Things Stand — Verified vs. Targets
- ✓GSC baseline captured — 520 clicks / 104K impressions / pos 20.5 / 0.5% CTR over the prior 3 months
- ✓4 customer-facing bugs fixed live — including same-day fix to the booking funnel’s address field
- ✓Working AI chatbot demo — WhatsApp handover, guided FAQ flows, ready to deploy at £0/month
- ✓90-day SEO strategy + Phase 1 audit — three-phase roadmap targeting position 8–10 by day 90
- ◌100% enquiry capture rate — target, currently measured via GA4 handover tracking
- ◌<2 min AI first-response time — target for the AI-upgraded chatbot, once live
- ◌3× repeat booking rate — 6-month target, tied to retention automation still in build
- ◌4.8+ Google review score — target for the reputation & review automation workstream
SEO: What’s Measured So Far
Baseline and targets from Google Search Console + the 90-Day SEO Strategy. Google typically takes 2–4 weeks to re-crawl and reflect on-page changes, so Month 1 figures aren’t in yet — this table will update as real data lands.
Why This Engagement Matters to Us
LHC is our first international client, and the first place we’ve run this exact playbook end-to-end: audit and fix revenue leakage before anything else, prove the cheapest working version of a system before recommending the expensive one, and never publish a number we can’t point to a source for. The private hire and airport transfer sector is underserved by technology — most operators are still running on manual processes and spreadsheets. LHC has the reputation and the fleet; what it needed was the operational infrastructure to scale, and that’s what we’re building, one shipped fix at a time.