Social Travel Sharing With BlablaCar

One of the most enduring memories I have of university (and it certainly isn’t what I was meant to be learning in class) is the feeling that every single penny counted. I’m not sure how I managed to spread the meagre money I was earning across my numerous social engagements but I know that it was done with due care and consideration.

I’ll never forget the time I went on holiday to Hermanus, near Cape Town in South Africa and was returning to Durban in Natal before heading back home to Johannesburg.  Now, South Africa is a big country and you couldn’t really pick three points further away from each other!  Unfortunately, I did not know anyone who was taking the route by car and a plane ride was so absolutely outside of my means that I decided to take a twenty-four hour bus ride from Hermanus to Durban.

Did I mention that my holiday had in fact consisted of me being a youth leader at a summer camp and that I was perhaps the oldest person on the bus, along with 70 children aged between 9 and 19?  Well, this bus ride was to go down as the single most unpleasant experience of my life.

We’d all stayed awake through the last night of camp, saying goodbye to the incredible people that we’d met over the previous three weeks, secure in the knowledge that we could sleep on the bus the next day.  Sounds reasonable, right? Wrong.  I was stuck for twenty-four hours with 70 tired, irritable and upset children and I was the very last person who was going to get any sleep but the first to clean up any evidence of travel sickness.

Of course, all of this came rushing back to me when I heard about a new social travel-share site called BlablaCar.com.  Quite simply, BlablaCar connect drivers with empty seats with people looking for a ride, thereby reducing costs, saving the environment (by reducing the number of cars on the road) and giving people a great way to stay social and meet new people.  This sounds like the car-share version of Couch Surfing and I wish we had something like this when I was at Uni!

This service is completely free to use, which I think is just incredible, and over 40 campuses in the UK have their own dedicated Campus website linking up university town drivers and passengers heading in the same direction. But the concept isn't exclusive to students - anyone can visit BlablaCar.com and benefit from the service.

To mark their launch on campuses across the country, BlablaCar are offering a £3,000 to the university club that is the most active on the site and the Campus competition is open to any university club looking to raise vital funds through student journeys.  Interested clubs can email campus@blablacar.com to request an information pack.

 

Disclaimer: This is a Sponsored Post but all opinions and troublesome memories of traumatic bus rides are my own.