Uruguay Go is the Uruguayan company that owns a transport application called UGO. Eduardo Hugo Gonzalezits creator and director, was a driver of taxis and other applications and today he faces with particular energy and enthusiasm this project recently approved by the Municipality of Montevideo of which gives details to Scope.com.
The salary is one of the main concerns of the creator of the project. “First is that any worker who works in transportation has to have access to 100% of the passengers. You have to work with all of them, otherwise the percentage goes down. So I say, as a driver, do I think it is necessary to have three applications? No, it is not necessary, then UGO is a solution”, explains Eduardo González.
“Drivers have profitability problems. These companies created a cheap travel sales sector and there are already many who believe that these cheap trips do not give them the profitability they need for such a large investment, where they have to pay taxes and pay all the expenses of a car, such as the fuel. It could be said that more than 50%, almost 60% of what they bill goes to expenses”, he maintains.
“The market reference price for these companies is the price of the taxi, as long as they are lower than the taxi, then you have the price of the taxi at 100 pesos to say an exact and round number, the companies charge you 80 pesos and those 80 pesos pay you 60 that you have 48 left, and you lose 24 in minimum expenses. In other words, in the end you have 24 pesos left when an independent taxi worker earns 29% of social, then we went on to earn less than the taxi drivers”, affirms González.
“It is more than clear that it is a problem of profitability. So UGO was created as an idea that is not to sell trips that others sell, What UGO sells are living wages which is the basis of a dignified life. Because? Because I am a driver and I think I know how much I have to earn to have a life”, says the creator of the application, who has spent most of his working life behind the wheel of a vehicle as an employee and also as a taxi owner.
“And well, a company came to make a difference. Because? Because here in a democratic way, if they want, they can do studies of the rates and they can tell me to raise them. What is sought is that they are comfortable, that they earn more and that they have job securitybecause there are many who have lost because companies have fired them for nothing.
And for the users?
Gonzalez is ambitious, and this is how he explains it: “In itself, the project is not a transport application, it is much more than that. Something is being developed that is the first time in the world, what we are going to achieve is that everyone who uses the UGO service has a wallet in which they are going to put something so that the trip is cheaper or free, or you will earn money, believe it or not”, he tells Ámbito.com.
“This is the first time in the world, in order to achieve this, the transport sector will be included with other high-consumption external sectors, but this will be a future step, so we have to start small,” he clarifies.
Regarding the rates, “prices are not much higherthat is, sometimes we can be cheaper and sometimes we can be a little more expensive, but there will never be huge differences”. In this regard, he also adds that UGO is likely to pay a higher percentage of taxes than the ones paid by the foreign companies.
González narrated that from when he imagined the idea until he obtained the definitive endorsement of the Municipality of Montevideo, more than four years passed. “When starting a transport application project, what I looked for was that everything was very correct, so it was done step by step correctly, and when it had to be presented to the Municipality of Montevideo, nothing was missing. they even congratulated me”.
Previous experiences led him to this. “There were already applications made in Uruguay, one of them did things wrong, brought an application from Europe where certain details were missing that could be submitted for the canon required by the mayor, so they had to do everything with sworn statements,” he explains.
How is the service used and from when will it be available?
“To use it is like any other application, we base ourselves on what is the user experience. You enter and simply make an account, register and to request a trip you have to enter the start and destination addresses. There a calculation of money is made for you and you request the trip. At that moment you will be asked for the payment method, which is where you have to enter the card, which is the same as in any application that you have to enter a card, “says González about the use procedure.
“Later, every time you request a trip, what he will always ask for are the security numbers of the card. You always have to put those 3 numbers, for security reasons,” says the director of UGO.
“What I’m trying to do is humanize technology. One of the things I intend to do is have a personal attention, So you have a problem as a driver or as a passenger, a problem that something went wrong, a malpractice that nobody canceled as it had to cancel, all that is easily fixed: you press a little button and there will be someone 24/7 to attend to you ”, he adds, as a differential of his service.
Mayor gave the endorsement
The Municipality of Montevideo confirmed to this medium that the company met all the requirements and has been enabled for a few weeks to provide the service in the capital. UGO began advertising on social networks and already has, according to its owner, 100 drivers waiting to start receiving passenger requests.
“We are going to be here,” says González.
Source: Ambito
