St Patrick’s Busiest Mytaxi Day Ever With Upsurge in Demand on e-hailing App

Mytaxi, Ireland’s leading taxi e-hailing app, carried 3.6 million passengers in Ireland over the first quarter of 2018, with St Patrick’s Day its busiest day ever.

The app registered a record amount of trips on March 17th this year, more than on any single day previously including on the Hailo platform – surpassing the previous record set in December by 15%. There was also particularly high demand over the Easter period for mytaxi, with Good Friday 2018 75% busier than the corresponding day last year.

Drivers were meeting huge demand relating to the St Patrick’s Day parades and festivities taking place across the country, as well as events around the international rugby and GAA taking place that day.  mytaxi drivers are now completing more jobs than ever before, with the average number of trips undertaken per driver each week up 36% year-on-year.  Service levels also continue to improve for mytaxi customers, with waiting times down to 3.6 minutes in the first quarter of 2018, a 7% improvement on the 2017 average.

General Manager for Ireland at mytaxi, Alan Fox, said: “We continued to see huge customer demand for taxis in Ireland during the first quarter of 2018, which traditionally tends to be the quietest of the four quarters in the year. This puts even greater emphasis on the need for us to expand our fleet in the face of an overall national trend of falling taxi numbers in Ireland. We are continuing to offer financial and technical support for drivers to join us and this has resulted in a really positive response over the last six months. Our fleet is actually now growing at a faster rate than demand growth which is improving our response rates to hails at peak hours. We are strongly committed to ongoing development of our services, with the average waiting time for a mytaxi down to just 3.6 minutes over the first three months of this year.”

703 new drivers have joined the mytaxi fleet over the first quarter, with the company also offering €1 million in incentives to the first 500 drivers who pass the SPSV test using mytaxi’s manual training platform, with 143 already passing in this way.  The platform is a free online learning tool that helps potential drivers pass the NTA’s challenging SPSV entry test.

According to the NTA, the total number of SPSVs, in particular taxis, declined by 24% between 2008 and 2017, with recent statistics showing that there is a total of 26,012 licensed taxi drivers in Ireland, representing a net loss of 400 drivers in 2017.

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