Virgin Atlantic, one of the world’s leading long haul airlines, today announced a unique initiative which will help its passengers find other travelers to share taxi rides into city centers across the world - saving both their wallets and ground carbon emissions. The Taxi2 website will help match passengers who are on the same flight or whose flights arrive at a similar time, and are traveling to a similar part of a city, so they can share the taxi ride.

Passengers will simply need to log onto http://www.taxi.to and input their flight and destination details (eg. hotel address) and the website will match them with a suitable traveling companion. They are then sent the details of the matched traveler and can decide whether to agree to the match and make arrangements of where to meet upon their flight arrival. Passengers can then print off a convenient Taxi2 sign from the website so they can locate each other at the airport. The system will also match female travelers who only want female traveling companions. The program is not limited to Virgin Atlantic customers and passengers on other airlines can share rides as well.

Dee Cooper, Director of Product and Service, Virgin Atlantic, commented:

“We are always looking at ways to help improve our passengers’ journeys and this is a simple initiative which helps them to connect in a clever way. We expect this scheme to be popular with our passengers.”

Ed Maklouf, founder of Taxi2, said:

“We are delighted to be partnering with Virgin Atlantic for this scheme, and our expectation is that this simple, sensible way of saving money and cutting down congestion and carbon footprint will become common activity for air travelers worldwide.”

The initiative was born out of Virgin Atlantic’s VJAM program, which is an Open Innovation initiative with NESTA, the UK’s National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (http://www.nesta.org.uk/v-jam/). The airline recently hosted the VJAM event to find new innovative initiatives, which its passengers would benefit from. This initiative is just one of many that came out of the VJAM program, which is focused on co-innovating with Virgin Atlantic’s passengers and blending topics that our customers are interested in with opportunities that make travel more social. Other VJAM initiatives will be released over the following months. See http://www.virginatlantic.com/innovationzone for details.