Questions and answers about carpooling and Boleia.net

It is a private carpooling service developed by the start-up responsible for the www.boleia.net project and accessible only to verified employees of companies / entities.

Its purpose is to help those who want to carpool on their commuting trips (home-work trips) (and not only!) by welcoming the person in a trusted network where you can find colleagues from the same company or collaborators who work in neighboring companies and who live nearby too.

See more information about Empresas à Boleia!

Our service is adapted to help employees of any type of company, be it small, medium or large, in any part of Portugal.

It is even free for businesses with fewer than 50 employees!

However, in order to verify a company and create your account, we must be able to speak to the person in charge of the company (especially in the case of small companies) or a person responsible in the human resources department (for example) who can create the account on behalf of the entity and who have the necessary means to inform its colleagues about the service.

We take great care to keep the portal accessible only to employees of serious and verified companies to maintain the service and members trust spirit to further develop carpoolinh in Portugal.

If you want to be part of the "Empresas à Boleia" community and that your company has not yet joined, present the service to them as it may not yet know you...

If you have the authority to create the account for your company and you have not yet done so, sign up here!

The service that we provide to companies and their employees through the portal "Empresas à Boleia" does not only correspond to the technical part that includes maintenance and development of new functionalities.

Our job is also to provide support to the users and to help the partner entities to communicate / encourage the good practice of car sharing with their employees, so that we can bring their internal CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) project to the success.

The different characteristics of the companies (number of employees, number of offices / factories, location, ....) bring us adapting the process to provide the service in a more efficient way.

Access to and use of the service for employees is completely free.

However this requires that entities activate an account that will, after checking with an account manager of our team, allow all employees of a company / entity to find people they can carpool to commute.

The account creation for small entities (less than 50 employees) is free, but they need to be registered by a person responsible to validate the access of their employees.

In the case of medium and large entities, it is necessary for a person in charge (from the Human Resources department for example) to register them as well so that we can evaluate the needs and the associated monthly fee (see service plans and prices).

In order to create always more trust in the platform, we verify the entities that can give their employees an access to the Empresas à Boleia portal.

Once authorized, the entity communicates to its employees the adhesion to the service and invites those interested in registering on the portal through:

• their company email address (for example "maria.figueira@company-x.pt")
• a registration code for those who do not have a personal email from the company (option reserved for entities with more than 50 employees)

In case of use of the registration code, users are confirmed by the entity before being able to create their account in Empresas à Boleia.

Carpooling to / from work is an increasingly common practice among employees of companies who live and work close to each other. It may not seem like a long trip, but at the end of the month it can still represent a quite significant cost for many people who daily go to the office or factory... 

We calculated what drivers spend in average (depending on the distance between their home and working place), without considering eventual highway tolls and parking costs:

You just need to find one or two people to divide the costs with (or regularly switch who takes the car) to divide these values by two or three, which represents a saving of 50 to 300 euros in the monthly budget of many people...

Car sharing is considered safer than public transport but, as it is mandatory on a bus or metro, both drivers and passengers must:

• wear a mask 

• wash your hands frequently (with soap or 70% alcohol-based disinfectant gel) 

• avoid touching your face as much as possible 

But you can also:

• obviously reduce the number of passengers in the car 

• if there is only one passenger, the ideal is for him / her to stay in the back seat 
• open the windows to let fresh air circulate in the car

It is also worth insisting on the fact that anyone who has symptoms should not carpool and that either drivers or passengers can refuse to travel / commute with people who have some.

Boleia.net is the "easiest-to-use" carpooling platform in Portugal.

It helps to connect drivers and passengers to allow them to share there trips and costs (if you didn't see yet all the advantages of carpooling, please give a look to them!).

Do you also want to save money while travelling ecologically with friendly people? Create your account now!

Given that our system is based on Google Maps, it is unlikely that your street or city is not in the proposals for example!

We ask drivers and passengers to NOT indicate their personal contact details (phone number or email adress for example) for several reasons:

• the page of your ad can be public: anyone could use this information to send you spam or bother you
• asking interested people to register on the portal (to allow them to contact you):
  • we also offer other members an opportunity to travel with these people in the near future
  • we offer you the possibility to leave an evaluation about the people with whom you traveled so that you can help the other members to decide with whom they should ride
• once you start exchanging private messages with another member, you have the choice (and responsibility) to give your contact details to that member (and you will see the phone number of the member if they added it on their profile details)
• the portal's internal messaging system sends e-mail notifications each time it receives a message from another member

In order to increase the chances of getting good carpooling experiences and in the use of the platform, our members are asked to follow the basic rules:

• be educated in the contact with the other members
• do not indicate your personal contact information in the comments of your ads (see why you should not do it)
• be honest about the information you share in your profile and in your ads (for example in relation to the cost contribution amount for a trip if you are a driver) 

A member who does not respect these simple rules can be immediately banned from the platform by the Boleia.net team.

On the Boleia.net platform, the payment of the ride (* if requested!) Is made directly in the car, between the passenger and the driver.

That is, unlike other platforms that require passengers to make an online payment (which usually includes an extra commission for the platform), booking a place in the car and obtaining the contact details of drivers / passengers is simply done in our portals by contacting the member directly: we remind you that the Boleia.net platform is completely free to use!

* a cash payment is not always requested: passengers and drivers can contact and decide, for example, to change who takes their car every week, a practice common for those who share a car on their daily "home - work" commute of the Empresas à Boleia service for example ;-)

Yes! We don't oblige passengers to pay online their seats (the agreed amount is given by the passenger to the driver during the trip), we do not charge any commission on the amounts given to drivers (and they are the ones who decide the amount requested for the participation regarding the trip costs).

The cost of a ride is the contribution to the travel costs (fuel and eventual tolls in general): driver and passenger(s) share the costs, so it's cheaper for everyone!

Thus, the contribution amount requested by the driver depends on the journey (the longer ones are generally and logically more expensive as the driver's costs are higher) and it also depends on each driver (there are certain cars that use more fuel, go through the highway or not, etc.).

You can find the requested amount per person directly on the page of the driver trip ad !

PS: when people decide to often share a car together, a cash payment is not always requested.

Passengers and drivers can contact each other and decide, for example, to alternate who takes their car every week: it's a common practice for those who share a car on their daily "home - work" commute of the Empresas à Boleia service for example and doesn't involve any payment... but still reduces every drivers monthly expenses as they don't use their own car for some weeks to go to work ;-)