BlaBlaCar: hitch-hiking 2.0

The story behind the Blablacar company is common enough for us all to relate to.

Three days away from Christmas, 2003, Frédéric Mazzella was in a rush to get his family home at a 300 miles distance from Paris but, unfortunately, all the trains were full.

Finally, his sister gave him a ride. He then noticed that most of the cars on the road were empty except for the driver. This inefficiency was food for the mind for Mazzella and the result was the car-sharing company Blablacar.

‘The idea was to organize all the available seats in cars just like we organize all the available seats in planes and trains, with a real search engine, and this did not exist. There was only demand and no offer and organized in a very weird way in that you would have neighbors who would share a ride but you did not know where they were going and when’, Mazzella said.

Since then, the company has grown significantly up to the moment when, in 2013, the French National Railway admitted it as being its competition.

Now, the Paris-located company has six million members in twelve countries who help passengers that want to buy seats locate drivers. The website gets over a million visitors daily who enter details about where they want to travel and when and they receive, in return, a list of the drivers heading in the same direction. Moreover, the website also incorporates a calculator which reveals the highest price limit a driver can ask for a seat, depending on the distance of the journey.

Mazzella’s idea was truly golden and everyone who shared the Blablacar experience described it as ‘useful, interesting, low-cost, efficient’. It’s success doesn’t go unnoticed as the company plans to extend to Asia, the US and Latin America.