Hailo, a London-based taxi app that last year sought to break into the D.C. market with a regulator-friendly approach, is pulling out of D.C. and all of North America.
The decision, first reported Tuesday by the Financial Times (sorry, paywall), reflects the steep marketing budget needed to compete with dominant e-hailers Uber and Lyft in the war for riders’ time and attention.
The District was one of several U.S. entry points for Hailo, which had gone out of its way to show its compliance with a series of controversial D.C. Taxicab Commission requirements last year. Drawing especially loud protest from Uber, the commission mandated that all cabs carry credit-card swiping boxes and that all e-hailing app providers (aka “digital dispatch services”) integrate with in-cab hardware.
Hailo and Commission Chairman Ron Linton in July 2013 summoned reporters out to the headquarters of United Ventures Consortium, an umbrella group for a half dozen taxi companies, to demonstrate that the above integration was perfectly reasonable.
Hailo had set up its D.C. office at 811 Florida Ave. NW. The company’s exit leaves one fewer taxi app operating in this market, a group that includes Alexandria-based Curb, formerly called Taxi Magic.
