2018 has been a considerably important year for Mobility as a Service (MaaS) with the release of platforms such as Mobilleo and the increasing drive to make autonomous cars a possibility in the near future. It’s safe to say that 2019 should continue to improve and build upon the hype generated by Mobility as a Service and we can expect to see these improvements through several different ways, mainly within the travel sector and other similar sub-sectors.

Mobility as a Service’s main goal is to revolutionise travel and in Mobilleo’s case, specifically business travel. As MaaS develops and grows so will business travel alongside it meaning that new introductions to the way we travel will begin to appear too, often being significantly more efficient and cheaper compared to more conventional and outdated forms of business travel. The time spent commuting to and from work could begin to become visibly shorter and it will impact greatly on how people perceive business travel as one of the biggest stresses and nuisances about working in densely populated areas.

Leading the way towards the future, Mobility as a Service is a critical element of changing our cities into Smart Cities. With the introduction of this concept involving the use of open data to personalise and improve upon travel for the user, Smart Cities will emerge from what many could consider the fourth industrial revolution. 2019 could see the interest in Smart Cities sky-rocket as countries worldwide begin to discuss the benefits of shifting their city infrastructure into a much more modern and efficient system. Rising interest in the concept of Smart Cities will, in turn, raise awareness of Mobility as a Service, both will see major developments in the next year and new possibilities will begin to become clear as time moves forward.

Alongside MaaS being involved with Smart Cities, it has also found itself involved in the development of autonomous vehicles. There has been a recent surge in interest in the testing and integration of self-driving vehicles to highly populated cities and successful businesses such as Uber and Toyota are just some of the leading companies leading the push towards having travel being fully automated. Within this coming year, we should expect to see further developments towards autonomous vehicles and plenty more wide-spread support towards the idea of having travel that relies of self-driving cars taking us to our destination in the future.

As we make movements towards more sustainable methods of travel, it should be clear that the dependency on cars will be replaced with more dependency on more unorthodox methods of travel, such as car clubs or public transport. Additionally, through the year Mobility as a Service platforms such as Mobilleo will steadily start to integrate with all these emerging methods and consolidate them all into one application, notably improving the effectiveness and convenience of booking these more cost-efficient modes of transport.

All these predictions for the MaaS industry in 2019 are only over features we are already aware of; the magic of Mobility as a Service is that it is a concept still in its early stages and is constantly being reimagined to make it more satisfactory for its users. We will almost certainly come across new features and concepts that will no doubt make MaaS even more of revolutionary creation. It is safe to assume that 2019 will be a critical year for Mobility as a Service and platforms such as Mobilleo will be the driving force in its development alongside the average daily business traveller.