It’s always nice to know that, in addition to using customer data to develop products, companies like Bolt are willing to share a little. The ride-hailing app, in a Spotify-like move, has shared data about its performance in South Africa for 2021.
Unlike Spotify Wrapped, though, this data isn’t intensely personalised. Bolt can’t do that, except maybe for this one guy. He’s generated enough data to create something special, we reckon.
Bolt from the blue
One person in South Africa booked the second-most Bolt rides on the African continent in 2021. That means they hailed the most rides in SA over the period. A mighty 908 rides were taken by a single user over the year. They were narrowly beaten by a Nigerian user, who took 923 trips.
The single longest trip in SA was also its most expensive. That’d be a 262km trip from Johannesburg to Ermelo, which cost R1,318. The longest trip recorded by the service in all the countries it services was a 513km jaunt, in Uganda.
But Bolt’s figures also show that South Africans… maybe aren’t that generous to drivers. The largest tip given over the year was just R184. That’s not a small amount, but it doesn’t come close to the largest tip for the year. A user in Kenya handed over the equivalent of R3,350 to their driver in 2021.
And then there was Johannesburg’s busiest day in 2021 — 3 December. The ride-hailing service tracked a monstrous 230,000 trips in the city on that day alone. The only thing special we can find about that day is that it was a Friday. It was awfully close to the end of matric exams and most students were finished– perhaps that’s got something to do with it.
