Hailocab launches in-cab payments
The taxi wars are hotting up as today Hailocab has announced new features – including the ability to use Hailo to pay for cabs you’ve hailed on the street.
It sounds pretty clever: The way “Pay with Hailo” works is that when hailing a cab from the street as you might do normally (well, if you live in London anyway) you can go into your Hailo app and it’ll figure out who’s cab your in – presumably by using GPS – and then you can ‘pair’ your phone with the driver’s meter. So at the end of the journey, you can simply hit “Pay with Hailo”, rather than fumbling around with cash.
Hailo say that with the new service you’ll get all of the benefits on the street as you would a Hailocab booked through the app, including email receipts and the ability to file a lost property request.
The development comes in tandem with a new web-based system that Hailo has created for places like hotels to use to book cabs for other people: It means the person behind the desk can organise everything, and the passengers can be updated on their cab’s progress via text message.
It’ll be interesting to see how Uber respond. Just the other day it beefed up its fleet. Hopefully this won’t lead to civil war on the streets of London as rival cab firms duke it out.
