{"id":6392,"date":"2014-07-03T15:20:41","date_gmt":"2014-07-03T15:20:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.vanrental.co.uk\/vanblog\/?p=6392"},"modified":"2014-07-03T15:20:41","modified_gmt":"2014-07-03T15:20:41","slug":"could-uber-style-van-app-slash-demand-for-van-hire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vanrental.co.uk\/vanblog\/archives\/6392","title":{"rendered":"Could Uber-style van app slash demand for van hire?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"TrafficAnyone who was in London on 11 June\u00a0is likely to have found that the capital’s\u00a0traffic was even worse than usual, thanks to a protest by the capital’s\u00a0black cab drivers, who parked up in Trafalgar Square to complain\u00a0about the in-roads being made into their archaic and closed-shop business practices\u00a0by mobile phone app Uber.<\/p>\n

[Uber is an app that allows anyone needing a taxi to use their phone’s GPS to find the nearest available taxi (normally a minicab), book it, and pay for it, if necessary.]<\/p>\n

Uber’s\u00a0makers says that it improves the efficiency of\u00a0taxi networks in dense urban areas, and I’d tend to agree. Black cab drivers, of course, are opposed, as\u00a0the\u00a0growing popularity of Uber means that more drivers are using their phones to summon minicab taxis, rather than walking the streets looking for a black cab.<\/p>\n

Uber for vans?<\/h3>\n

In the UK,\u00a0services such as Uber are restricted to passenger transport — but\u00a0in Hong Kong,\u00a0a\u00a0new startup, GoGoVan<\/a>, is doing the same thing for\u00a0urban freight services.<\/p>\n

The premise behind the business is that while some businesses have their own dedicated fleet of vehicles, many don’t, and rely on ‘man and van’ services, couriers and\u00a0daily-rented vans to\u00a0collect and deliver goods around\u00a0large cities. According to the firm’s chairman, Gabriel Fong<\/a>, in Hong Kong, 35,000 of the city-state’s 70,000 registered vans are essentially owner-operator or small\u00a0courier companies. Historically, they’ve relied on telephone-based call centres for business, but the GoGoVan app\u00a0speeds\u00a0means that drivers can receive instructions much faster and with far greater geographic accuracy — meaning they can\u00a0sometimes be at the job within minutes.<\/p>\n

The company gathers feedback on each job and rates drivers, removing any who\u00a0consistently fail to meet the required standards.<\/p>\n

Could it work in the UK?<\/h3>\n

So could this model work\u00a0in the UK? GoGoVan has already expanded to Singapore and recently secured a ‘seven figure’ round of funding and is targeting international expansion within the Asia-Pacific region, into\u00a0cities such as Tokyo and Seoul.\u00a0I can see how it could work in Europe, with the proviso that, in the UK at least,\u00a0we don’t have the same culture of ‘calling a van’\u00a0like we call a taxi.<\/p>\n

In my experience, most businesses have direct\u00a0relationships with courier and light haulage companies — call centre-based services such as those with which GoGoVan is competing are less common, although the rise of parcel websites such as MyParcelDelivery.com is perhaps a sign that this might be changing.<\/p>\n

After all, as long as the price\u00a0and service are\u00a0right, who cares who the provider is?<\/p>\n

Naturally, this might have a damaging effect on the self-drive van hire business in urban areas — after all, if you could\u00a0call up a van with driver on your phone within, say, half an hour, you might not go to the trouble of hiring a van for the day to drive yourself…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Could UK city dwellers soon summon a man and van service with an Uber-style phone app like GoGoVan?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7],"tags":[1858,1857,1678],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vanrental.co.uk\/vanblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6392"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vanrental.co.uk\/vanblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vanrental.co.uk\/vanblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vanrental.co.uk\/vanblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vanrental.co.uk\/vanblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6392"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.vanrental.co.uk\/vanblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6392\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6395,"href":"https:\/\/www.vanrental.co.uk\/vanblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6392\/revisions\/6395"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vanrental.co.uk\/vanblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6392"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vanrental.co.uk\/vanblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6392"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vanrental.co.uk\/vanblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6392"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}