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DRIVING

How to cut travel costs by carpooling in Spain: Eight trustworthy options

Carpooling or car-sharing apps can be a great option for those in Spain who don’t own a car or can't afford expensive travel. Here are eight of the best companies to choose from and how each one works.

Published: 3 December 2021 11:48 CET
Updated: 11 August 2023 16:45 CEST
people carpooling in spain
Car sharing apps in Spain. Photo: Zac Harris / Unsplash

Whether you only need a car for weekend trips, you’re looking to save money on your daily commute or you just want a cheaper way of travelling around Spain and abroad, carpooling apps could be an ideal solution for moving around in Spain. 

What are the advantages of carpooling in Spain?

Firstly, carpooling can save you a lot of money at a time when transport costs have become increasingly expensive in Spain.

By sharing expenses with others, it’s estimated that you can save up to 75 percent of the price of just going alone. As a driver, it means that you can earn money to help pay for your trips and as a passenger, it means that you don’t need to worry about the extra expenses of hiring or owning your own car.

Secondly, car sharing is ultimately helping the environment, reducing the number of cars on the road and the CO2 that they produce.

Lastly, it can also be seen as a great way to meet new people. If you’re travelling around Spain, it can be much for fun to travel with and get tips from the locals, rather than driving alone.

Around 80 percent of Spain’s population live in urban areas, many of which are densely packed and easy to get around on foot or have great public transport networks, meaning that owning your own car isn’t always necessary. This means that you can easily rely on carpooling apps when you need to. 

READ ALSO – Driving in Spain: What are the extra costs of owning a car?

How do carpooling apps work?

Most of the time, someone with a car will create a route and post it up online, stating when they are going and how many spaces they have available. You can usually search by route and if someone has created one that you want to go on, you can simply sign up.

Each platform works in a slightly different way, see below for eight of the best and how each one operates.

BlaBla Car

BlaBla Car is probably one of the most well-known and most popular carpooling apps in Spain. This is because it’s also the largest car-sharing app in the world with more than 65 million users, five million of which are in Spain. This means that BlaBla Car is also one of the best options for travel from Spain to other countries, such as nearby France and Portugal. The app also has a section called Smart Stopover, allowing for better connections between smaller towns and villages.

When you book a trip you can access data about the driver such as name, age, and type of vehicle they drive. You can also see opinions and ratings from other passengers who have travelled with them. When the journey is over, the passenger and the driver can both give each other a score.

The company recommended a contribution of around €0.06 per kilometre and limits the maximum contribution that drivers can request, to ensure that there is no profit on the journey. Management fees from the app range from €1 (when contributions range from €1 to €6) to 17 percent of the contribution when it exceeds €51.  

READ ALSO: The tricks drivers use to pay less in car taxes in Spain 

AmiCoche

AmiCoche is a free Spanish-created car-sharing platform, which aims to promote car sharing in Spain and Europe without profit. Payments are made in cash directly to the driver and not via the app. 

Drivers can publish a particular route and passengers can search for routes to see if anyone has created one where they want to go. 

DriiveMe

DriiveMe is a little different from just simply a car-sharing app, because it also allows you to hire cars and vans for as little as €1 for 24 hours. It also offers moving services and vehicle transfer services.

The car hire is so cheap because the fleet of vehicles it uses are those that need to be transported to different locations around Spain. In this way, the company saves money on employing drivers to transport them.

This does mean however, that while you can deviate from the route a little and take extra time, you do ultimately have to arrive at a particular destination at a certain time, so you don’t have as much freedom as regular car hire companies. 

Compartir Coche

Compartir Coche is a network of companies and organisations that promote car-sharing services. It is completely free to use and sign up and there are around 78,000 registered users.

It operates in 68 countries, so you can also use it when you want to travel abroad, not only within Spain. 

Shaking hands with a fellow carpooling passenger is not something you should do during the Covid-19 pandemic. Photo: PHILIPPE DESMAZES / AFP
Shaking hands with a fellow carpooling passenger is not something you should do during the Covid-19 pandemic. Photo: PHILIPPE DESMAZES / AFP

Amovens

Amovens is similar to BlaBla Car in that it is up to the driver to create the route and accept passengers to join them on their journey. It has around 1.5 million users in Spain and scores are given for both drivers and passengers, so you see what the people are like before you travel with them.

Management fees cost 10 percent of the total with a minimum of €1. The company also offers the option for car cheap car rentals, either for the day or for the month, if you want to use one regularly. 

DedoCar

DedoCar is more geared towards people who want car sharing for regular journeys, such as travelling to work, so could be good for those who live in cities or in urban areas outside cities and need to travel in every day.

According to DedoCar “in Madrid 4,000,000 free seats are being wasted per day, and most of them can be used at rush hour”. 

Travel expenses are automatically divided between the number of passengers in the car, based on the distance travelled by each one. The idea is that the driver can pick up and drop off different passengers at different points along their daily commutes.

Viajamos Juntos

Viajamos Juntos, translates as ‘We Travel Together’ and is a free carpooling platform used in both Spain and Argentina. It has been around since 2004 and operates in a similar manner to AmiCoche.

Compartocoche

For Compartocoche, both the driver and the potential passenger can create routes to try to find people who want to share their journey. The company also places special emphasis on drivers who want to use VAO or High Occupancy Vehicles lanes in big cities like Madrid, so it could be good for regular routes such as going to work or university.

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TOURISM

How much more expensive will holidays in Spain be this summer?

Whether it be hotel prices rising or shortages in the aviation sector making flights more expensive, a summer vacation in Spain this year is likely to cost more than last year.

Published: 25 April 2024 09:13 CEST
How much more expensive will holidays in Spain be this summer?

With lingering inflation, drought conditions, rising rents and building social tension surrounding the impact of mass tourism on Spanish society, summer 2024 could be an eventful one in Spain for a number of reasons.

It will probably also be more expensive than it was in the past, especially if you’re staying in a hotel or tourist apartment.

This follows a bumper Easter period that saw high occupancy and price rises across the country, and if forecasts and industry experts are anything to go by, it’s a trend that will continue into the summer season.

READ ALSO: ‘The island can’t take it anymore’: Why Tenerife is rejecting mass tourism

Hotel prices March increased by 10 percent compared to the same period in 2023, and have now experienced 34 consecutive months of price increases.

The average hotel room in Spain during March cost €109.2 per night, according to Hotel Tourism Situation data published by Spain’s National Statistics Institute (INE).

How much more expensive will flights to Spain be this summer?

Firstly, flights. Aviation industry experts suggest that a perfect storm of conditions could cause the price of flights to increase for summer 2024. A shortage of commercial planes, caused mainly by a combination of problems on Boeing’s production line and Airbus having difficulties with engine manufacturers, will likely drive up prices around the world.

These “are factors that don’t make it easy for prices to fall,” according to Pere Suau, professor of Economics and Business Studies at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, who admitted that “it is difficult to measure the extent to which” they will go up. The key, in Suau’s opinion, is to see how demand will be affected by price rises. “As of today prices are rising, but demand is tolerating it, demand continues to grow,” he adds.

Reports in the Spanish media suggest that prices on budget airlines like Ryanair could rise by around 10 percent.

READ ALSO: EasyJet opens Spanish base in Alicante with ten new routes

How much more expensive will hotels in Spain be this summer?

So, flights will likely be more expensive this year. But what about hotels?

It’s difficult to say exactly by how much hotel prices will have risen by summer, but most estimates put it at somewhere in the 8-12 percent range, depending on factors such as location, occupancy, type of accommodation (ie. is it luxury or budget) and length of stay.

However, despite that, most experts seem to think the price rises will be slightly less than the 2023-23 year-on-year increases, when average hotel room costs shot up by 16.5 percent, according to statistics from SRT and Cushman & Wakefield.

Albert Grau, partner at Cushman & Wakefield’s Hospitality department in Spain, told El Periódico de España that: ‘We expect there to continue to be growth in prices… although it will be more moderate, in single digits, compared to the large increase in the last year.”

Spanish news outlet La Sexta reports that hotel rooms in the summer will be on average 11 percent more than last year, according to figures from INE and Travelgate.

Forecasts by American Express Global Business Travel (Amex GBT) put Barcelona, long a popular tourist destination, among European cities where a significant increase in hotel prices is expected, with a projected rise of 9 percent. Other Spanish cities, such as Bilbao and Valencia, are forecast to see price jumps of around 8.5 percent.

In Andalusia, hotel sector insiders in Andalusia are expecting a 7 percent increase overall this summer, according to Trinitario Bertore, director of Hotel Plaza Nueva in Granada, who spoke to La Sexta. Bertore said a night’s stay in a hotel in Andalusia can now cost up to €210, a 7 percent rise compared to last summer.

José Luis Contreras, managing director of Apartamentos Valencia Costera, said prices in tourist flats in Valencia will also rise by around 7 percent and even reach an eye-watering €350 per night in the high season.

Both Bertore and Contreras said that there’s no need to lower prices because demand is increasing, despite the per night rate increases.

It seems clear that accommodation will likely be a more expensive for summer 2024 in Spain than it was last year, though the year-on-year rise will slow slightly. Most forecasts put the average expected hotel price rises at roughly 10-11 percent overall.

By exactly how much will depend on several factors: where you’re staying, and whether it’s a traditional tourist spot such as parts of Andalusia, Alicante, Valencia or the Canary and Balearic Islands; whether it’s a hotel or apartment; the quality of the accommodation; how long you’re staying; how far in advance you book; when exactly in the summer season you’ll visit Spain.

Aviation industry uncertainty also means that flights will become more expensive, so both travel and accommodation are likely to be more expensive in Spain this summer.

Tourism makes up a significant portion of Spain’s GDP. Predicted tourism earnings for 2024 are expected to bring in €202.65 billion, an 8.6 percent increase on 2023, a record year.

However, growing anti-mass tourism sentiment has been bubbling in Spanish society for some time now, with protests in various cities around the country decrying the impact, among other things, of Spain’s tourism model on the local housing market.

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