India presents a unique opportunity for city-to-city ridesharing, says BlaBlaCar COO

BlaBlaCar, the popular inter-city ridesharing service in Europe, has finally arrived in India. The service lets car owners offer rides while travelling from one city to another, sharing the cost of the journey with co-travellers. Nicolas Brusson, who co-founded the company and is now its COO, leads its international operations and was instrumental in raising a $100-million investment from UK-based Index Ventures. In an interview with Business Today's Vivan Mehra, Brusson elaborated on BlaBlaCar's plans for India.
Edited excerpts:

Q. How did the concept of ridesharing come about?
A. Frederic Mazzella, the Founder and CEO of BlaBlaCar, originally imagined a new way of travel when he could not get home one Christmas several years ago. He had no car. The trains were full. The roads, too, were full of people driving alone in their car. It occurred to him that he should try to find a car owner that was going his way and offer to share fuel costs. And thus BlaBlaCar was born. Today, with over 10 million members in 14 countries and 2 million people travelling every month, BlaBlaCar is making road travel social, more affordable and more sustainable.

Q. What made you decide to come to India?
A. India presents a unique opportunity for city-to-city ridesharing, as car owners are already keen to cut the cost of long journeys and share their expenses, while co-travellers are now lacking comfortable ways to travel large distances at the last minute. BlaBlaCar could generate a much deeper transformation of city-to-city travel than what we've seen in European markets so far.

We feel that BlaBlaCar makes sense for India because of unavailability of train tickets and inadequate infrastructure to book a trip at the last minute. India is a big road country where people travel a lot. Indians spend on transport a high 20 per cent share of their wallet. India has a high rate of Internet connection, mobile usage and social media usage (over 100 million Facebook users, 160 million plus smartphones). Then, India has a young population to which the BlaBlaCar service is especially appealing (75 per cent of the online audience is between 15 and 34).

Q. How will you tackle the issue of safety given the problems Uber faced recently? What methods will to employ to ensure safety of women?
A. BlaBlaCar is present in 14 countries with over 10 million registered members. Each month, over 2 million people travel with BlaBlaCar. We take our members' safety and security extremely seriously and therefore, BlaBlaCar provides a range of features to create a secure, reliable, trust-based community and easy connections between car owners and co-travellers, especially women.

BlaBlaCar members choose who they are travelling with thanks to each member's public profile on the website, which contains real identity, ratings from previous co-travellers, picture, biography, preferences and photo, and comfort level of their car.

The BlaBlaCar team verifies emails, phone numbers and Facebook profiles. BlaBlaCar also constantly moderates and monitors the content published on the website (texts and pictures) in order to ensure the quality of the offers, and the member support team answers questions of the community seven days a week.

Q. Car pooling is not popular in India. How will you go about promoting it?
A. Sharing rides is not a new concept in India. It already happens informally all the time. BlaBlaCar will enable a lot more people to learn about ridesharing and use technology to make this simple and convenient. We've launched in India to offer an alternative travel solution and help people make their long distance rides more affordable, comfortable and sustainable by sharing. We have received a lot of positive feedback from our members and we are seeing car owners find co-travellers on their trips.

This shows that people in India are willing to try the technology enabled concept of ridesharing. The main drivers of BlaBlaCar's success include making city-to-city travel possible last minute, saving money both for car owners and co-travellers, trust and safety, high quality of service and strong word of mouth, iPhone and Android apps that make travel easy to organise and convenient.

Q. How will you make money in India?
A. We will not be charging a fee in the beginning. BlaBlaCar is a free ridesharing platform in India. BlaBlaCar's aim is to build and foster a trusted community of ridesharing in India. Later, we will charge a fee from co-travellers when they book seats through BlaBlaCar.

Q. How will you fix pricing of fares to ensure people don't get taken for a ride?
A. BlaBlaCar was not designed for car owners to make a profit from their journey. To ensure that car owners respect this principle, BlaBlaCar recommends a ceiling price per co-traveller for every journey. Car owners offering a ride can then fix the price inside the recommended window with a strict ceiling, which also includes a capping of the number of seats that can be offered. This is a contribution towards the fuel, running costs and tolls, if there are any, of the car owner, not a revenue.

Q. What means of advertising will you use to promote the company?
A. At BlaBlaCar, we use a mix of digital marketing and on-ground campaigns to promote the brand and create awareness about the benefits of ridesharing.