How The Maaxi App Is Helping Black Cabs Fight The Uber Trend

The Maaxi App is gathering pace as it recruits black cab drivers looking to compete against rival car pickup services such as Uber and Heilo.

Maaxi can be used by strangers who all want to go in the same direction but don’t necessarily want to pay the full cab fare themselves. It helps match up to 5 individuals so they can all hop in the same cab and share the ride. This lets them split the fare for the part of the journey they took but avoids them having to pay a full cab fare.

The app does all the hard work such as finding other people waiting for a cab and also calculates the fare and each person’s share of it while helping the cab driver earn a little extra.

Usually black cabs or hackney carriages, as they are affectionate known in London, don’t charge any extra for carrying two, three, four or even five passengers but Maaxi is a little different. “It charges each person less than the meter fare but overall gets more by aggregating all the partial fares,” explained Gabi Campos, the firm’s chief executive.

The fares are calculated according to the distance and how long each individual spends in the taxi. Say five people split a shared journey, while five people are in the cab the fare is distributed equally between the five of them. If one person gets out then the rest of the fare is split into quarters for the remainder of the journey unless another passenger gets dropped off. In this case any additional fare would be calculated on the passengers left.

There is no complicated messing about with calculators or doing mental arithmetic as the app calculates all of this for you. It can even arrange passenger pickups to be daisy chained so this helps the taxi driver by being more efficient and it will provide the taxi user with an estimated fare for their proposed ride based on previous journeys that have used a similar route.

It remains to be seen if Londoners will be willing to share their cab rides to save a few quid but if so, then the Maaxi app could become common place in many cities around the world helping cabbies fend off the encroachment of Uber and Heilo. You can read more about the Maaxi App here or check out their Youtube promotion here.