The reason we started with TransferHero…
Not even a year and a half ago I was travelling quite often. Working as a consultant required me to travel back and forth to various locations, and there were two main things that bothered me (not counting the flights being constantly late which is obvious).
- Figuring out how to get to and from the airport
Naturally, there were clients who would pick you up and take you back to the office spaces, where I was spending most of my time anyway, but most times, I would be figuring out what is the best way to get to the place I needed to get to for hours at a time, downloading 3 or more apps, especially if it was a place I was travelling to for the first time.
2. Figuring out what is the best way to offset my carbon footprint
Aeroplanes are one of the biggest polluters around when it comes to travel, and being in the corporate travel industry made it that much worse for me. I was constantly trying to figure out what is the best way to offset my carbon footprint and it usually ended up by me not doing a thing. Until onetime, I was so guilt tripped by this one article I read in one of the inflight magazines (don’t remember which one) that I decided to do something about this.
So. I tried calculating my carbon footprint with 10 different calculators and looked into green travel tips. But the information varied from website to website, and in the end, I decided it was best to just use the airline's carbon offsetting tool and calculator.
What do you think happened? I paid up, the airline gladly accepted my credit card and voila. Nothing. To this day, I have no idea where my money went.
A few months later, to be fair, through a series of random events, my now co-founders and I created — TransferHero — the worlds first online platform for pre-booking environmentally sustainable airport transfers.
So why airport transfers and not flights?
Good question. Coming from the travel industry, I knew the challenges of ground transport and the pains that the taxi/ride-hailing/transfer companies have on airports. You see, drivers of all of those taxi companies suffer from idle waiting time.
a) The concessionary taxi company has to pay high barrier costs, and then enters the barrier and spends about 30–45 minutes waiting with the car running and moving slowly till they get the next passenger.
b) The ride-hailing company it works roughly the same. They have a virtual line somewhere around the airport. The drivers usually wait on a random unpaid parking sport close to the airport, and when they get hailed, jump in and go for the pickup. This also takes between 30–45 minutes
c) The “meet and greet” and transfer companies have to park on the airport, pay for the parking, and then wait at the arrivals terminal with your name on a tablet or sign. When you find them they will take your bags and travel back to the place where they parked. And yet again, they lose about 45 minutes.
We wanted to tackle two birds with one stone, so we came up with a solution.
How it works:
We started using predictive analytics and triggering events to reduce the idle waiting time of drivers from the previously mentioned 45 minutes to 2 minutes, and we decided to create the “greenest available” category and also plant a tree for every ride made by donating to fully transparent reforestation projects.
This gets us better prices from the taxi companies, and the difference becomes our commission and a way for us to make money.
So now, by using TransferHero, travellers can travel completely green, without compromising on price or convenience, and a greener planet really can be only a ride away.
So what are you waiting for. Join us!
