At BlaBlaCar they love to set the example of Happiness. She is, over seventy years old, something like the perfect client, capable of arousing tenderness and humanizing the algorithms. She is not an invention of the marketing department: she exists in real life, she has grandchildren, lives in Extremadura and shares a car with other BlaBlaCar users to go see her family. Her presence inside the vehicle conveys the same thing, happiness, but it is also the best demonstration that the car-sharing app, as its managers assure, is no longer just for young people. The company itself, which turns fifteen this year, has fully entered maturity.
“Ten years ago the average age of users was between 23 and 24 years old, but now it is 33 years old, and 20% are over 50 years old,” explains BlaBlaCar operations director in Spain and Portugal, Florent Bannwarth. . Born in 2009, something similar happens to the ride-sharing platform to Facebook and the particular ecosystem of services born around the concept of collaborative economy: its clients also have gray hair.
BlaBlaCar itself, created in France in 2009, has already left behind the era in which it presented itself as a casual startup born from the vision of its founders, who realized during one Christmas the number of cars that move with a single occupant and the thousands of people in need of transportation.
Gone is the stage of financing through the FFF (family, friends and fools), business angels – the Spanish Cabiedes and Partners was one of the first to bet on the company – and the rounds with investors, the last of them, with the presence of the World Bank.
Now its managers manage a business plan that includes terms such as diversification and consolidation of the customer base, typical of an established company. They even respond with “all options are open” when asked about their possible IPO. In Spain, their second largest market, they want to become strong in the bus and sell train tickets.
“We are thinking about taking the multimodal leap,” says Bannwarth when explaining future projects. The company, considered a unicorn with a value exceeding 1 billion euros, has already launched seven bus lines to connect the north and east of Spain with France and Portugal and is exploring new services.
The group's income has exceeded 200 million euros in 2023, growing 7% compared to 197 million in 2022, and in terms of net profit the conditions for profitability are already beginning to exist. In Spain, the platform has 8 million subscribers and broke an activity record in 2023, with 1.5 million active users. “This year we expect a new record,” says its main director in Spain, proud that in 2023 BlaBlaCar travelers will have linked 86% of the country's municipalities in one way or another. Another avenue for growth is in the efficiency provided by technology. “45% of the routes are already suggested by technology, which allows trips to be better planned to respond to the needs of users,” indicates the main person in charge in Spain. There are also new machine learning solutions, the fight against fraud and the integration of new products such as train tickets.
BlaBlaCar, which considers itself “a real-time thermometer on economic activity”, recognizes that transport aid has had a certain impact on activity in Spain and awaits the relaunch of the Sustainable Mobility law to finally have a definition of the car sharing service. France is much more advanced in this area.
Their legal clashes with the bus employers have been resolved after two rulings, the last of them in 2019, in which it is considered that BlaBlaCar's activity does not constitute a case of unfair competition. Car sharing barely accounts for 3% of trips, although they are still very present at music festivals and large events. Among all these trips are, of course, what Felicidad does to see her grandchildren.
