The RideHub app searches multiple on-demand ride-hail and taxi providers, displays their prices and pick-up times with the cheapest and quickest highlighted, and then enables you to filter for electric, luxury and disabled access cars if you wish. You choose the ride you want, confirm in the provider’s app, and get on your way.
Hundreds of thousands of people in London spend more than they need to every day getting from A to B or waiting street-side for longer than necessary to get picked up. We have found that, on average, RideHub is saving passengers £10.30 per trip in London. There are even worthwhile savings of £3 to £10 to be had for short trips, which of course add up over time, and we often see savings of £15 or more. The largest saving so far is £39 on a trip from West London to Hackney.
RideHub is free to use, there is no need to sign up and our mission is to always provide a transparent view of the best deals available from the providers on our app.
How did you come up with the idea for the company?
RideHub was born from the frustration of late night searches for a car to get home from a Christmas party last year, standing on the side of the road with four apps open at 2am trying to find a car that could come in less than 20 minutes whilst not costing £50 for a two mile trip! Of course, by the time a fare and timing looked reasonable, that car had been booked by someone else and so the search process started over.
This is not great on a cold winter night. So, we built RideHub to search multiple ride-hailing apps and taxi apps concurrently and enable immediate booking, so we and our friends would not have to be in that situation again. Being in the app stores, other Londoners found the app and started using it too. We received feedback from these early users, which we reacted to by adding functionality, and before we knew it, we had thousands of downloads and increasing numbers of trips being booked every week.
That’s when we decided that RideHub could have a bigger mission. We all want to save money where we can, so giving users not only a transparent price comparison with the best deals highlighted, but also the context of those prices with pick-up times and options like five-seaters or disabled access, demonstrated that they can get the ride they really want, every time. We also feel the increasing financial pressure on individuals and businesses from the coronavirus outbreak. RideHub makes travel by car or taxi more affordable and therefore accessible to more people more of the time.
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What advice would you give to other aspiring entrepreneurs?
Surround yourself with very smart, experienced, connected people committed to the mission of the business. It’s going to probably be a longer journey than you expect, so you need the best possible people to navigate it, who in turn will help you access the right advice, supporters and investors along the way. Think big, act big, become big.
What can we hope to see from Ridehub in the future?
RideHub users save £10.30 per trip, on average, and we often see savings of more than £15 or £20 on longer trips. We believe that more people should benefit from savings like these, and with even more choice, so in the coming months we will be adding more ride-hail and private hire providers and also expanding to other cities in the UK and Europe. We have the RideHub app on our home screens and the actual provider apps in folders in the back of our phones.
That’s how we want to enable everyone to think about booking a car: using RideHub to find the ride they want, knowing they have a complete and transparent view of all options available to them that they can book with with just one more tap.
We also want to ensure that key workers will receive any discounts given by providers, and will be adding a button to ensure they are shown prices and book with those discounts included, to ensure they are getting the very best deal intended for them.
This functionality is being built into the second phase of a full app UI refresh that we will be releasing in the next couple of weeks. Not only will the refresh bring a new brand identity, but also a cleaner view on the trip route and also sections showing monthly savings. That way we can be sure that our customers have a clear view on the savings we find them.
We have many more plans for the coming year, including full account management so multiple app accounts can be managed through RideHub, and also adding other modes of transport. We will reveal more on that nearer the time!
