Hip Pivots to Tackle Return-to-Work Strategies

Hip's Amiad Solomon Talks...

• Working with travel managers on return-to-work strategies
• Devising a transportation technology platform for a Covid-19 world
• Partnering with ground transportation suppliers

When Hip CEO Amiad Solomon launched his company two years ago, he envisioned creating a platform similar to Uber and Lyft targeting intercity commuters—"the 100 million people who travel more than an hour to work by subway, train, bus or driving a car," he said. Since the onset of the Covid-19 crisis, Hip has turned its focus largely from working with commuters to working directly with companies as they plan to get employees back to their offices. Solomon spoke recently with BTN transportation editor Michael B. Baker about that new focus, which has included working with some travel managers who also have been tasked to help with that process at their companies.

BTN: What was your strategy pre-pandemic?

Amiad Solomon: We launched our first line in the Bergen County area, from New Jersey to New York. Where Uber and Lyft have changed the world in terms of intercity commutes, most people are driving or spend time on transportation in the morning and the evening, when they go from their homes in the suburbs to the city and come back. We're looking at towns that are satellites of Manhattan and starting [to move] people daily from the suburbs to the city. We grew from a handful of people in the first few days to hundreds, then thousands and tens of thousands rides. With the reservation system, someone doesn't have to wait at the bus stop and hope there's room, and if there's a delay, you can sit at home and get an alert. Driving is very expensive and tiring and not efficient both from an environmental standpoint. We were about to launch in Chicago and D.C. and Boston and LA and many other places across the country. In March 2020, Covid shows up, and we saw a big decline [with] people not going back to work. We decided to grow the team and build a solution that is tailored for corporates. We worked very hard to build it, and we basically launched, two months ago now, a complete corporate or white label offering to help plan and bring people back to work. In a few months hopefully there will be a vaccine or medicine, so how does a company start to look to bring people back in a comfortable way? Nobody wants an employee to be on a subway car and infect the entire floor of an entire building. How do you take control of the staging and the elevators and the building? How do you look at contact tracing?

BTN: How do you do all of that?

Solomon: Imagine a world where there's a dashboard [with] an algorithm that takes [a company's] thousands of employee addresses into the system, crunches it and [determines they] can use two cars, three vans and six vehicles to bring everyone safely in. Everyone has a branded app by the name of the company reserving a seat. The system is a smart system that picks up people from home or locations near home. It stages the time when everyone shows up so the elevators are not mobbed. There's contact tracing going back to see who sat next to Barbara last Monday on which bus as well as health consent in terms of liability and everything around it. We built the whole thing for powering corporate rather than go[ing] after consumers. While we continue to run our service at a smaller scale in Bergen County, there's a tremendous movement, and a lot of companies that have Covid-related teams planning their return to work.

BTN: What size company are you targeting?

Solomon: It's companies that have at least a few hundred employees or more, probably small or medium. It's not a start-up with 10 people. Any company that has a few people in an area, that's relevant. If they have 100 employees and six people in Bergen County, that's perfect for us. It extends all the way to the largest banks and institutions with tens of thousands of employees. One of the most interesting parts is that we're going into a period where things will change. There's a good chance employees won't come five days a week, Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Some people might come in one day and not for the second. Only with technology can you manage that type of capacity management. Our system automatically knows how to organize or retool everyone and dispatch a certain amount of cars or vehicles. That creates a whole new level of interesting complexities that can only be solved with software, and that's what we're busy doing.

BTN: Are you working directly with travel managers being asked to help in return-to-work strategies?

Solomon: Yes, we're working with travel managers, but also, we're seeing a lot in these Covid teams people from human resources. In terms of the way the company looks at it, they have to have contact tracing and health consent automatically done by everybody coming back, in terms of liability and knowing who might be testing positive. That is something that across the board we're hearing and everyone is looking for solutions. The great way to do it is organizing commuting. The other aspect is from the passengers themselves. Employees are looking for a place and a way to come back comfortably to work. They're concerned about coming back to a place where they don't know who they're sitting next to or getting on a public bus. One company we're talking to now—one of the largest in New York—their back-to-work is voluntary, but they want to encourage it, and they see it as a big retention offering. People will be able to come back to work and the company will provide the transportation services with all the software end personalized experience for people to come back.

BTN: Who are you working with on the supplier side?

Solomon: Empire [CLS] is a good example. We work with them. They are one of our transportation suppliers, and we built a great relationship with them. We don't provide the cars or the drivers. We work with the top companies in the U.S. When a company comes to us, we tell them we have the best drivers, the best cars and the best company dealing with it, and we integrate the software. We announced the Empire deal, and they're well known for their service and reach and a lot of companies know them and appreciate them. We integrated our software into their platform so we can offer this together with them.

BTN: If a company has their own partnership with a supplier, is that something you can leverage as well?

Solomon: We also have the ability to sell the software by itself. We can basically integrate it. There are a few companies that not only are working with other providers, they have their own shuttles or drivers for the service. We're talking to them to see how to integrate our technology into their platform.