How SF City Limo Cut Customer Acquisition Costs 43% Using AI on the Client Data It Protects Most

At a glance

• Company: SF City Tours, Inc., operating as SF City Limo (LinkedIn)
• Industry: Premium ground transportation: sedan, SUV, Sprinter van, minibus and motor coach service, national and international, through a vetted affiliate network (see the fleet)
• Teams using Nera: Marketing and client services
• Plan: Nera ChatApp, Business tier
• The challenge: Finding out which campaigns, channels and clients drive the business, when the answer depends on client identities and spend history
• Headline result: Cost per acquisition down from $102.67 to $58.72 and conversion rate up from 7.82% to 18.3%, in 6 months

The problem

SF City Limo serves a discreet, high-value client base: corporate accounts, repeat luxury travelers, and clients who book through referral and loyalty relationships built over years. Knowing which campaigns convert, which clients deserve the most investment and where the fleet underperforms means digging into exactly the data the company protects most: client identities, spend history, referral sources and internal operations.

"I wanted to use AI software with peace of mind, without worrying about exposing sensitive business or client data," said Sam D., CEO/COO of SF City Limo.

That's what brought SF City Limo to Nera.

Marketing: where the next dollar should go

The marketing and client services teams used Nera to analyze campaign performance across the business: corporate versus retail channels, bus versus sedan and SUV service, tours versus airport transfers. They tracked cost per acquisition, conversion rate, referral share by client and average spend, then compared clients and accounts against each other and against their own history.

Over six months, the Sprinter and bus campaigns showed direct, measurable results:

• Cost per acquisition fell from $102.67 to $58.72, a 43% reduction
• Conversion rate rose from 7.82% to 18.3%, more than doubling

The bigger change was in how budget decisions got made.

"It changed my investment pattern. I allocated budget more efficiently between marketing, referral discounts, promo codes, and credits to loyal and high-ticket clients, and responded faster to clients coming through specific channels."

Sam D., CEO/COO, SF City Limo

Asked what single insight captured the shift, Sam named a question he could finally answer: "It helped me understand where my investment matters more, where I should be allocating more budget, and which clients are most valuable to the business. It helped me scale at a faster rate."

Fleet operations: where service is at risk

The team also used Nera on day-to-day fleet data that rarely gets analyzed because pulling it together by hand isn't worth the time: driver call-out rates, on-time responses to wake-up call notifications, and lateness trends across the fleet.

The marketing analysis showed where to spend. The fleet analysis showed where service was likely to fail before it did. Both ran on real client and operational data, and neither exposed that data to the AI model doing the work.

Getting started

"The onboarding process was simple," Sam said. "Once connected, I was able to chat and get strong analysis that helped me make informed, critical business decisions, decisions that helped me grow and scale the business."

His advice to a peer serving a similarly discreet clientele was to use a tool that lets you run AI with peace of mind, without worrying about exposing sensitive business or client data.

Where this goes next

SF City Limo can apply the same approach to seasonal demand forecasting across service lines, deeper analysis of driver safety and incidents, and client-value and referral analysis in new markets as the affiliate network grows. Each is a new question on the same setup, with the same guarantee.

"SF City Limo didn't need a slower, more careful version of AI," said Rami Akeela, Ph.D., Founder and CEO of Nera Systems. "They needed the real thing, applied to the data that actually runs their business, without having to choose between capability and confidentiality."

Nera Systems builds confidential AI infrastructure for regulated and data-sensitive businesses. Client and business data is encrypted before it leaves your control. The AI model receives the question and the shape of the data, never the underlying values. Learn more or try it yourself.