Airports and Uber 2016: Transportation Network Companies now more welcome at airports. CAPA report

CAPA recently conducted a new survey of airports and their relations with and attitudes towards Uber and other Transportation Network Companies (TNCs). This follows a shorter questionnaire-based report published in Nov-2015.

TNCs are just one of the many methods of peer-to-peer car (or ride) sharing that are catching on globally as a result of the high costs of motoring and hiring traditional taxis, allied to the use of advanced technology platforms. They are the ultimate, most evident and visible statement of the sharing society - and millennials are the biggest adopters.

Peer-to-peer networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads between peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the application. They are said to form a peer-to-peer network of nodes.

While the direct peer-to-peer rental of motor vehicles where the renter drives for a short period of time (e.g. one to two hours) - either by corporations, through car clubs or even via manufacturers - in order (for example) to access or leave an airport is still in its infancy relatively speaking, the business of the TNCs is growing rapidly. Car sharing is expected to generate USD6.2 billion in annual revenues by 2020, from 12 million members worldwide. That revenue will increase as and when the TNCs move to corner that segment for themselves as well.