All You Can Travel for €500/Month
Tired of switching apps to plan a trip? Whim lets you book all your journeys with bus, tram, taxi, car and bike in one application. Subscription options range from pay as you go to €500 per month for unlimited access to all urban transport services.
Mobility as a Service (MaaS) originated in Finland where it was pitched by Sampo Hietanen, CEO of Whim. This led to the creation of Whim by parent company MaaS Global for Helsinki in December of 2017. Having all platforms at your fingertip reduces the need to pay for “unused capacity” as “cars take 70% of the market and it’s used 4% of the time so you’re paying for the optional capacity” per Hietanen.
Instead of having to subscribe and enter payment information on various platforms, Whim gives you the capability of paying for your entire trip on their subscription-based platform. Subscription options range from pay as you go to €500 per month for unlimited access to all of the city’s transport options, taxi rides under 5 kilometers and car rental services. These various subscriptions allow you to speed up your weekday commute to work while giving you options to rent a vehicle for leisure on the weekends. The platform is not about decreasing car use but giving citizens the freedom of planning trips without depending on car ownership.
The application’s ability to centralize every single transport mode demonstrates its completeness as compared to the more specialized Jelby and Hely platforms. With the service being launched in Helsinki proving to be a success, MaaS Global followed up on this success by expanding to Antwerp, Birmingham, and Vienna. The platform is looking to expand to several US cities as well as Singapore in order to globalize the notion of making efficient trips without the need of owning an expensive box on wheels.
