17 Nov 16
News

BlaBlaCar exploring corporate options

Cars have one job: to take people from A to B. “But they have a usage rate of only 2.7%”, says Alec Dent, Business Development Manager at BlaBlaCar. For an expensive piece of kit, that is a shocking rate of under-usage – and a business opportunity for BlaBlaCar, the leader in long-distance car-sharing. Its mission: to increase the 1.7 average car occupancy rate in Europe. 

BlaBlaCar concentrates on long-distance drives, a huge market: up to 76% of trips between 100 and 800 km are done by car. BlaBlaCar offers a digital platform for drivers and passengers to find each other, a C2C model they call 'people-powered travel'. And with success. BlaBlaCar has generated a large-scale trusted community of over 40 million users, growing at a rate of 1.5  million new members each month.

“We now move more passengers than British Airways, and almost five times as many as the Eurostar”, says Dent (pictured at the Fleet Europe Remarketing Forum last Tuesday). Strong growth results from the platform's clear advantages: drivers and passengers share cars – and costs, reducing travel price for the driver and offering cheap transport for the passengers. The system has logistical and environmental benefits as well: average BlaBlaCar occupancy is 2.8 – more than one person higher than the European average. This translates into less emissions and less congestion.

As the sharing principle is also gaining traction in corporate fleets, BlaBlaCar is considering ways to better align its model with the requirements of business mobility. “At the moment, we are still in a purely exploratory phase, but we have some ideas. “We would like to explore how we can encourage employees and corporates to offer their long-distance trips for sharing via the BlaBlaCar platform. Perhaps this is something they have not considered yet; but it could potentially reduce the TCO of their corporate fleet. And by sharing the return between driver and company, both parties could be incentivised to use BlaBlaCar. We have an open mind on this and other models of cooperation, and look forward to interacting with fleet operators and the wider industry on this topic”.

Image: Fleet Europe

 

 

 

 

 

Authored by: Frank Jacobs