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In previous blogs we’ve talked about creating a national network of rental buses in Spain on tour routes. Today we’ll be talking about a similar idea for workers.
In the world of road-based transportation in Madrid and other cities in Spain, charter and tourist bus transportation plays second fiddle to worker transportation. The latter is often one of the cornerstones of a bus rental company. To survive with your current fleet size, it may be important to adapt to today’s technologies and leave behind the work structures and formats of yesteryear.
That’s why we’re excited to have found out about a company that has taken an important step in innovating worker transportation. They say that their goal is to save their clients’ time and to make the trip to work more enjoyable, sociable, and relaxing. We’re talking about a company called ‘RidePal’. What they’ve done is simple, and in terms of technology, it’s similar to websites for group purchases. Through the internet, they find as many people as they can who take roughly the same route from home to work.
Everyone who gets on to the website can create new routes or vote on and sign up for existing routes, including routes already in service and those which haven’t been activated yet. Once there’s sufficient interest in a specific route, the RidePal company contracts with a bus operator to take the passengers. These are luxury buses with WiFi onboard, giving passengers the opportunity to work online if they so desire, and since there’s a mixture of travelers from different companies, the travel costs and the billing to the participating companies and travelers is managed via the web. The client companies only pay for occupied seats and don’t have to worry about half-empty buses.
This initiative has all of the advantages of traveling by bus and eliminates many of the disadvantages of traveling to the office. It’s more geared towards the actual flow of people based on routes, and it’s more efficient because it brings together everyone who needs to get to a certain destination and not just one company.
We’ll be curious to see if some coach-for-hire companies with interests in this niche will get together in Madrid or Barcelona to implement a similar project in Spain or if we’ll have to wait for this company from San Francisco to open offices here. Who wants to give it a shot? This might be a good idea for the Esteban Rivas transportation company, or perhaps Autocares Hermanos Montoya.
