Niagara ride-share service to Zoom ahead
From pizza delivery to a licensed operation, company set to compete with Uber
What started as an easy way to make some extra cash while in school has turned into a young man’s bid to challenge Uber and local taxi companies as the king of Niagara’s roads.
In six days, Zoom, a locally owned ride-share company, will officially launch. Owned and operated by 25-year-old Walid Al Hilaly in Niagara Falls, the service will offer rides in St. Catharines and Niagara Falls.
“We have around a hundred drivers,” said Hilaly, who says a grand opening for Zoom will be held next month. “We want to provide a great service and provide job opportunities in Niagara.”
Although Zoom is set to launch as a fully licenced service, it has been operating in Niagara for years.
Even before Zoom had a name and its green, smiley face logo, it existed as Al Hilaly’s one-man operation.
In 2012, he was a freshman computer science student at Brock University working as a delivery man.
“I was working for the Glendale Avenue Pizza Pizza, and I had a lot of deliveries to Brock. At that time there was a pub at The Pen Centre called Kahunaville. A lot of students would ask me for a ride back to campus,” Al Hilaly said.
“It was a way for me to make a little extra money. I was on a BlackBerry then, and my BBM contacts went from 10 people to over 900 really quickly.”
He said his boss at Pizza Pizza didn’t know what his driver was up to at first, but when he found out a few years later, he complimented his former employee.
“He laughed and said that was a good move on my part,” Al Hilaly said.
Al Hilaly said by his second semester at Brock, it was getting harder to make ends meet, deliver pizza and focus on studies.
One day during a class, he got a text from a student needing a ride to the airport. Al Hilaly had to make a choice. Stay in class, or leave and make some badly needed cash.
“So I decided to it was time to focus on this and see if I could make a real business out of it,” he said.
For a few years, Zoom existed as many ride-share services did, as an unlicensed operation. But it was popular enough for Al Hilaly to make a living and hire drivers.
The future for Al Hilaly arrived in November 2015, when Uber set up shop in Niagara. Like Zoom, it was operating illegally without a licence. But the popularity of Uber resulted in the Niagara Regional Police services board to start issuing licences to ride-share services in 2016, much to the chagrin of local taxi companies.
The change opened the door for Al Hilaly to transform Zoom into something bigger.
While he applied for an operator’s licence, he set up shop at Spark Niagara — a business incubation centre in Niagara Falls.
Al Hilaly said Spark was critical in helping him develop the plan to revamp Zoom. Soon he had a business plan, a new logo and a smartphone app.
In March 2018, Zoom’s licence was approved, giving Al Hilaly the means to secure insurance for his company and perform background checks on prospective drivers.
At launch, the new Zoom will have rides in Niagara Falls and St. Catharines, but Al Hilaly has an eye to expand the service across the region.
Competing with the already established Uber and taxi companies is a tall order, he said, but he believes Zoom as a made-inNiagara service can carve its own space in the market.
For instance, he said Zoom has car rides and SUVs for larger groups. But it will also have “Zoom Her” — a service for women looking for rides from female drivers.
“When I started, we had a lot of women asking for a female driver for safety reasons,” he said. “So we do.”