Blacklane is a Berlin-founded global chauffeur service operating in over 500 cities across 60+ countries. They offer pre-scheduled and on-demand journeys for in-city, airport, and inter-city travel, serving frequent business travelers and high-value leisure guests. The company recently agreed to be acquired by Uber as part of its expansion into luxury and executive travel.
The service itself earns loyalty. The problem was turning one standout experience into a repeat booking pattern, in a category where every trip is a standalone decision. Nobody opens the Blacklane app on autopilot the way they might reorder coffee. Each journey requires a conscious choice, and that makes incentive design harder than it looks.
What needed fixing
- Building repeat booking habits in a category with no natural purchase cadence.
- Configuring incentives by car class, budget, or referral mechanic without workarounds.
- A/B testing incentive mechanics and measuring whether they actually changed behavior.
The challenge: turning a great ride into a repeat booking habit
Before Voucherify, Blacklane ran incentives through an in-house system. It handled the basics. But as the business scaled internationally, the CRM team kept hitting the same constraint: configuring incentives by car class, budget cap, or referral mechanic meant workarounds or dead ends. The team knew what they wanted to test; they just couldn't build it.
For a company operating across 500 cities in 60 countries, that kind of inflexibility becomes a growth problem fast. Ioana Pascaru, Senior Customer Lifecycle Manager at Blacklane, felt it from the CRM side daily.
"The ambition was there, but when every new campaign turns into a workaround, you end up playing it safe. And safe means generic." – Ioana Pascaru, Senior Customer Lifecycle Manager
Voucherify, Braze, and the end of workaround culture
Blacklane brought in Voucherify for its API-first architecture and ability to scale across markets. Braze handles CRM orchestration and cross-channel messaging; Voucherify manages the promotion logic underneath.
Ioana's team drove the migration, and in the process pulled product and engineering into a broader conversation about incentives as a growth lever the company hadn't fully explored. What started as a platform switch became a company-wide reset on what promotions could actually do.
The CRM team now runs seasonal campaigns, referral mechanics, and sequenced journey incentives, all configured with granularity the old system couldn't support: voucher type, car class, budget caps, referral logic, redemption limits. On the integration side, Blacklane connects Braze and Voucherify through API snippets embedded directly in Braze campaigns. When a campaign triggers, it calls Voucherify to generate unique codes on the fly.
From single vouchers to sequenced journeys
The best proof of what the new setup unlocked is a consecutive journey mechanic Ioana's team built around one journey category.
They spotted an opportunity: guests who book one leg of a trip often need another. Instead of sending a one-off voucher and hoping it sticks, they designed a sequence. Each completed booking unlocked the next incentive, pulling the guest through a multi-step journey aligned to their actual travel plans.
This is a different approach from the standard "here's a discount, come back sometime" playbook. It's a structured path from first journey to repeat behavior, across touchpoints and channels, designed to build a connection with the guest over time rather than buy a single transaction.
"A single voucher is a transaction. A sequenced journey is a relationship. That shift changed how we think about the entire role of incentives at Blacklane." – Ioana Pascaru, Senior Customer Lifecycle Manager
Incentive testing as an operating principle
Blacklane doesn't treat incentives as set-and-forget. A/B setups and control groups are standard practice, and measuring incrementality is how the team decides whether a mechanic is worth scaling.
The question they're answering with every test: is this incentive actually changing behavior, or would the guest have booked anyway? That distinction matters when you're protecting margin while growing.
Voucherify makes this practical by letting the CRM team spin up campaign variants with different rules, segments, and incentive structures without requiring engineering support for each iteration. The entire setup, from campaign logic to testing and optimization, is managed by a lean team: four people in CRM, five in marketing, with support from sales and customer care.
"If you can't measure incrementality, you're guessing. And guessing with margin is expensive." – Ioana Pascaru, Senior Customer Lifecycle Manager
What's next
Ioana's team is moving toward matching incentive types more precisely to individual guest journeys, shifting from broad campaigns toward offers that reflect where each guest actually is in their travel lifecycle.
They're also evaluating Vincent, Voucherify's AI-powered experimentation agent, as a way to scale how they approach incentive testing across markets.
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