Spending 110 days a year in cities in 22 different countries can raise envy. Although if the plan is due to labor issues and most of the time is spent on customer visits, it is no longer as desirable. This was the position of Guillermo Campoamor (Valladolid, 1987) while he worked in the export area of a Spanish winery, an experience that gave him the inspiration to create his own company.
“I found that where urban mobility was facilitated, I made up to 12 meetings a day, while in other cities of the same size I could do at most three due to road problems,” he recalls. That's when he decided to develop a project that would improve the displacements based on the needs and preferences of the user. All to achieve sustainable mobility that will facilitate access to different media more quickly, efficiently and ecologically.
The result is Meep, an app launched in September 2018 that combines all means of transport on a single platform: from public metro and bus networks to taxis, VTC, shared vehicles and cars, motorcycles, bikes and scooters for use.
"It is not a simple route planner or an aggregator of transport options, but it also allows you to book and pay all the necessary means for a journey at a single place at no additional cost to the user," Campoamor points out. In this way, Meep moves the user experience observed in other areas to its field: “mobility evolves towards consumption centers where you can have different options in a single platform to choose what you like, as is happening with the Video on demand, ”explains the entrepreneur. The idea is to materialize the MaaS concept (mobility as a service, English Mobility as a Service), which in the transport sector refers to the offer of endless resources to move around a city without having your own vehicle.
The island of Malta is, for the moment, the only place where Meep allows all the functionalities of the application, while in Lisbon, Malaga and Valencia only the option of planning routes is available. Why was Malta chosen as an advance? The founding team of the application was a very interesting place as a closed testing ground for having all kinds of means of transport: from buses to ferries, through new urban mobility options. "In addition, there the English mentality played in our favor, more likely to do pilot tests, which makes innovation management more flexible, unlike other places where launching a new project takes more time for bureaucracy and administrative processes," according to Campoamor.
Meep's future includes having all its functions active in eight cities before the end of 2020 and expanding its model to interurban connections. "The plan is to always start by integrating the public network because it is where a greater volume of users can benefit, so we are waiting to have the permissions to replicate the Malta model in other sites," concludes its CEO.
