Terms and conditions

UrbanGo (in these terms, for short, “UGO”) is the name under which Kenjy Saadi trades, with its place of business at Via Pasquale Lucchini 10, 6900 Lugano, Switzerland, contactable at [email protected].

UGO provides the technology with which a taxi circuit or a private hire operator (the “Operator”) handles booking requests, assigns them to its own affiliated drivers (the “Driver”) and records how they are carried out.

Booking requests (the “Services”) may reach the Operator by telephone, through the app intended for passengers (the “Passenger”) or through a business that has an arrangement with the Operator (the “Partner”).

UGO is not a party to the contract of carriage. The contract of carriage is formed between the Passenger, or whoever requests the Service on their behalf, and the Driver who carries it out. UGO does not provide transport services, does not set the price of them and is not an agent for them.

These general terms of business (in what follows, for short, the “Terms”) form part of the contract:

• for the Operator, from the moment its own space on UGO is activated;
• for the Driver, from the moment their own profile is registered;
• for the Passenger, from the moment they submit a request for Services through the app.

The Operator is the party that uses UGO. It is for the Operator, and not for UGO:

• to take on and to remove its own Drivers;
• to set its own fares and its own booking fee;
• to decide whether a journey is paid for in the vehicle or invoiced to one of its own account customers;
• to agree prices and terms with its own Partners.

UGO applies these settings and records them. It does not set them, does not check them and is not answerable for them.

A Driver may be affiliated to more than one Operator. Removal by one Operator does not close the Driver’s profile and does not affect their credit.

Everything the Operator enters or produces using UGO remains its own: the records of its customers and of its Partners, the prices it has agreed, its fares, the history of its bookings and the documents produced.

The Operator may export its own data at any time, in a machine-readable format, without having to ask permission and at no additional cost. The right remains even once the Operator stops using UGO.

In the same way the Driver’s profile, their fares and their credit remain theirs, and follow them at every Operator they are affiliated to.

UGO does not carry passengers and does not act as an operator, whether directly or through connected companies. UGO does not compete with its own customers in its own customers’ market.

In the passenger app a request is visible to the Drivers available in the area, whichever Operator they work with: the Passenger is not assigned exclusively to any Operator. The Operator that serves the journey records it in its own customer records, and that gives it no exclusive right over that person.

A request for Services is recorded on UGO by the Operator or by the Passenger. UGO offers it to one or more available Drivers.

The Service is taken to be accepted only when a Driver accepts it. Until that moment no assignment has taken place and no availability is guaranteed.

The Driver is free to refuse. UGO does not in any circumstances guarantee that Drivers will be available, nor any particular waiting time.

Who a request reaches. It reaches the Driver who at that moment is on duty, holds credit on their own profile under clause 7 and works in the area of the pick-up point. For a request recorded by the Operator the Driver must also be affiliated to it; for a request submitted by the Passenger through the app the offer reaches the Drivers available in the area whichever Operator they work with, as provided in clause 3.

What determines the order. Among the Drivers who meet the conditions above, the order and the timing with which the request is offered depend on how close they are to the pick-up point, on the estimated time to reach it and on whether the Driver is already carrying out another journey. The aim is to shorten the Passenger’s wait, not to share the work out in equal parts: UGO does not guarantee any Driver a number of offers or a share of the bookings.

Credit does not buy position. Holding credit is a condition for receiving requests; holding more of it does not make any request arrive sooner. No payment of any kind, whether to UGO or to the Operator, changes the order described above, and no positions are for sale.

Where it is the Operator that decides. The Operator may assign one of its own requests directly to one of its own Drivers. In that case the assignment is the Operator’s, the order described above does not apply, and UGO carries it out and records it, as provided in clause 2.

The cost of the Services is calculated from the fares set by the Driver or, where the Driver has chosen to adopt them, from the fares of the Operator they are affiliated to. A fare is made up of:

• Base fare. The minimum charge for the journey or for the call-out.
• Rate per kilometre. A charge for each kilometre, added to the base fare.
• Day rate. Applied during the daytime hours that have been set.
• Night rate. Applied during the night-time hours that have been set.
• Waiting time. Any hourly charge for time spent waiting.

Where a price has been agreed between the Operator and one of its own Partners, that price prevails over any fare.

The Operator may apply a booking fee of its own to the price of the journey. Where it does, the Driver sees both the cost of the journey and the amount due to them before accepting.

The price shown is an estimate. It is calculated on the distance returned by the mapping service UGO uses, and may differ from the route actually taken. Where the price is set by a taximeter, the taximeter prevails.

UGO retains a commission of 20%, calculated on the amount due to the Driver, that is on the amount net of any booking fee charged by the Operator. The commission is stated exclusive of VAT, which is applied at the rate and in the manner required by the law in force.

The commission is retained on a booking that is not carried out, too. A booking that is accepted and then not completed uses up the commission in the same way as one that is completed. The only exception is a pre-booked journey cancelled within the time set by the Operator, one hour before the pick-up time unless set otherwise, which gives rise to no deduction at all.

The commission is not money that UGO collects from the Driver: it is use of prepaid credit under clause 7.

The Operator’s booking fee, where it is applied, is a matter between the Operator and the Driver. UGO calculates it and records it on the Operator’s behalf but does not collect it and is not answerable for it. The accounting records produced by UGO are not tax documents.

To receive requests the Driver must hold credit on their own profile. Credit is bought in packages of a fixed amount, and the amount credited may be higher than the amount paid. UGO may credit an amount free of charge, as part of a promotion. The Operator may buy credit from UGO and pass it on to its own Drivers, as a way of recognising their work.

Credit has the following characteristics, which the Driver expressly accepts:

1. It is not money and cannot be converted into money. It may be used solely to pay the commission due to UGO.
2. It may be credited without payment. Credit that has been bought and credit that has been given flow into a single balance and are used up in the same way, with no distinction between them.
3. It is not refundable, save where the law requires otherwise.
4. It does not expire. It remains available for as long as the profile exists.
5. It ends with the profile. Closing the profile, at the Driver’s request or for any other cause, means any remaining credit is lost, and it is neither refunded nor transferred, save where the law requires otherwise.
6. It follows the Driver, not the Operator, and does not leave UrbanGo. It remains usable at every Operator the Driver is or will be affiliated to, including credit passed on by an Operator the Driver has since left. It is not tied to whoever credited it: it is tied to the platform.

The amount credited is expressed in units of credit in the currency set on the profile, and is not subject to conversion.

Credit is not a means of payment. It is not accepted by anybody other than UGO, it cannot be spent with third parties, and part of it may never have been paid for by the person who holds it. It is the unit in which access to the service is measured, not money deposited with us.

The price of the journey does not pass through UGO. The Passenger pays the Driver directly, or the journey is invoiced by whoever is responsible for it where it has been recorded as such. UGO does not collect, hold or advance the price of the Services, and does not record how much the Driver has actually taken.

UGO collects payment for credit top-ups only. For those transactions UGO uses the Stripe platform, whose own terms apply in full.

The commission due to UGO is taken from the credit when the booking is closed.

The Driver and the Operator declare that they hold every licence, authorisation, insurance cover and requirement demanded by the law that applies where they work, and undertake to keep them valid.

UGO does not check that those requirements are held, does not certify that they are valid and is not answerable for them. UGO records what has been declared. Responsibility for carrying on the business in accordance with the law that applies to it rests entirely with the Operator and the Driver.

Where it is required, UGO produces a record of the journey from the data recorded for the booking and from what the Driver and the Operator have declared. The record is sealed when the booking is closed and can no longer be changed.

Responsibility for the accuracy of what has been declared, and for the record meeting the law that applies to it, rests with whoever produces it. UGO does not warrant that the record satisfies the requirements of every jurisdiction.

UGO provides a tool for managing work and for putting people in touch. UGO is not answerable for:

• the Services not being carried out by the Driver, or being carried out badly;
• the price not being paid by the Passenger or by whoever requested the Service;
• whether Drivers are available at a given time or in a given place;
• the accuracy of estimates of price, distance and time, which depend on third-party services;
• the Operator’s own commercial decisions on fares, booking fees and arrangements with Partners.

These Terms are construed and applied according to Swiss law. The courts of Lugano, where UGO has its place of business, have jurisdiction over every dispute arising out of these Terms, save for any mandatory consumer protection rule that gives the consumer the courts of their own place of residence.

Severability. Should any provision of these Terms prove to be ineffective or void, in whole or in part, it is replaced by a new provision that comes as close as possible to the first in its legal content and its economic purpose.

Changes. UGO reserves the right to amend and add to these Terms, giving the Operator and the Driver notice beforehand. Changes will ordinarily be about meeting new legal obligations and about introducing new services.

The processing of personal data is subject to the Swiss Federal Act on Data Protection and, for those in the European Union, also to Regulation (EU) 2016/679 (GDPR), and to the UK GDPR for those in the United Kingdom.

What is processed. UGO processes the personal data of the Operator and its staff, of the Driver and of the Passenger: by way of example first name, surname, email address, telephone number, vehicle details and registration. UGO processes the Driver’s location data while they are on duty, in order to offer them bookings and to show the Operator where they are.

UGO keeps the data of the bookings: pick-up and destination addresses with their coordinates, distance, times, amounts, outcome and any notes entered by whoever took the request. It is the content of the Operator’s history and, where it is required, of the journey record.

Disclosure. The data needed to carry out the journey is disclosed to the Operator handling it and to the Driver who accepted it. The Passenger’s telephone number is made available to the Driver only after acceptance, and for as long as it takes to carry out the Service. UGO uses third-party providers for mapping and route calculation, for payments and for communications.

Processing abroad. The service and the database are hosted in the European Union. UGO may process and transmit personal data outside Switzerland and the Union as well, for instance in using cloud platforms, subject to the safeguards required by the Federal Act on Data Protection and by the GDPR. The providers concerned are named in the privacy notice.

Rights. The rights of access, rectification, completion, restriction and erasure, of withdrawal of consent and of portability remain, and may be exercised at any time.

Retention and erasure. Closing a profile anonymises the personal data but does not remove the accounting records. On closure, the personal data held in the profile is removed; the records of bookings, commission and top-ups are kept, for as long as legal obligations require, stripped of identifying data and to the extent needed to reconstruct economic dealings that have already been concluded. Any remaining credit ends with the profile, under clause 7.

Contact. Requests about personal data should be sent to [email protected].

UGO is at present available and operating in Switzerland, Italy, France and the United Kingdom. The geographic limit follows from operational and linguistic considerations and is not discrimination based on the nationality, the place of residence or the place of establishment of users.

In accordance with Regulation (EU) 2018/302 on geo-blocking, UGO applies no technical measure to prevent users resident in other Member States of the European Union from reaching the platform. Users reaching it from other countries of the Union may view its content, it being understood that the Services can in fact be used only in the areas that are served.

UGO reserves the right to extend, restrict or change the area in which the Services are available over time, in accordance with the law in force.

A registered event agency (the “Agency”) may publish a booking request in the space on UGO given over to these requests (the “Marketplace”): what it needs, when, where and on what terms. The Operators that work in that area see it and may apply, describing what they are able to make available.

An application is an offer, not an assignment. By applying, the Operator acquires no right over the work and blocks nothing: the Agency reads the applications and chooses who to call back. If the work went to whoever applied first, there would be nothing left to decide.

Answering is part of the exercise. An Agency that has received applications tells those who applied the outcome, including when it is a refusal: an Operator that gets no answer has no way of knowing whether its offer was read at all.

The Agency is not visible to the Operators until it makes contact. A published request reveals neither its identity nor its contact details: contact travels one way only, from the Operator towards the request, and it is the Agency that calls whoever it has chosen.

UGO is not a party to the agreement and does not guarantee it. What the Agency publishes is what it says it is offering; what the Operator answers is what it says it can do. These are statements, not undertakings towards UGO: terms, payment, deposits and penalties are agreed between them, off the platform, and remain their business even when nothing comes of them.

What may be published. A request describes a real transport job, with true information. Fictitious or test requests must not be published, nor third-party data that the publisher has no right to use, nor offensive or unlawful content, nor direct contact details in the text so as to get around the way this clause works.

UGO may remove a request or an application that breaches the above or the law, and may restrict access to the Marketplace for anyone who does so repeatedly. In either case it gives written reasons for the decision to the party affected.

Who sees what. A request is shown to the Operators that work in the areas the Agency has indicated, and that is the only criterion by which the audience is selected: no positions are for sale and no visibility can be paid for. Applications are visible to the Agency alone: an Operator does not see who else has applied, nor how many applications have arrived.

No guarantee of outcome. UGO does not warrant that a published request will receive applications, nor that an application will lead to an agreement.

The Marketplace is free while we launch. Publishing a request and applying carry no cost and no commission today. UGO reserves the right to introduce a charge for access to the Marketplace: should it do so it will give written notice at least thirty days beforehand, and anyone who does not wish to accept it may stop using the Marketplace before the charge takes effect, without that affecting the rest of the contract.

The commission under clause 6 remains due on the bookings actually dispatched through UGO, and does not depend on this clause.

A request is deleted, not archived. The Agency may remove a published request at any time: from that moment it is no longer visible and can no longer receive applications. UGO does not notify the Operators that had applied.