Ireland had the busiest taxi drop-off point in Europe last year, according to mytaxi
Ireland had the most popular destination for mytaxi passengers across the whole of Europe last year.
The company revealed that passengers took more than one million trips to Dublin Airport using the e-hailing app.
Eyre Square in Galway, Patrick Street in Cork and O'Connell Street in Limerick were the most popular drop-off locations across the nation outside Dublin in 2018.
The app also carried more than 16 million passengers across Ireland in 2018, 3.4 times the entire population, covering nearly 66 million kilometres - the equivalent of driving around the world more than 1,640 times.
In its look back at 2018 travel patterns and facts, mytaxi found this Christmas to be its busiest on record, with Saturday, December 15, seeing the biggest demand on the app for taxis from passengers ever, followed closely by Friday, December 21 and Saturday, December 8.
March 2, when Ireland was worst-hit by Storm Emma, was the quietest day of the year for the taxi app.
The average waiting time for a mytaxi driver improved year-on-year to three minutes 43 seconds over 2018, a 10% improvement. The average waiting time for a mytaxi hail to be accepted in 2018 was 32 seconds, dropping from an average of 35 seconds in 2017.
The average rating given to mytaxi drivers by passengers was 4.8 stars out of 5 in 2018, with drivers saying that over 10,000 items were left behind by passengers in taxis over the year.
General Manager for Ireland at mytaxi, Alan Fox, said: “2018 was a remarkable year of growth for mytaxi in Ireland, most noticeably with regard to trips taken by passengers to Dublin Airport, which was our most popular destination across all the nine European countries and now more than 100 European cities we operate in internationally.
“Including those joining our fleet who have passed the test using our free online training manual, last year was our most successful 12-month period for driver recruitment since 2013. We want to continue to build our capacity in a sustainable and innovative way to match customer demand in 2019 and we will continue to enhance the mytaxi app based on the valued feedback we receive on an ongoing basis from our passengers and drivers.”
Cross-border traffic through the app grew by nearly 200% in the year, with passengers increasingly using the same app to hail taxis across the 100 European cities mytaxi operates in.
The top three origin countries for tourists using the mytaxi app when visiting Ireland were the United States, the UK and Germany with 8.5% of all mytaxi journeys in Ireland being taken by visiting tourists.
The three most popular countries for Irish travellers using mytaxi abroad were Germany, the UK and Spain.
For the first time in 2018, 100,000 licensed taxi drivers internationally signed up to the mytaxi app, with more than ten million unique passengers using it.
