After the iconic motorbike convoys that were a signature scene of the Spring Festival travel rush vanished, carpool services have underpinned the highly mobile China.
Among the memories of the Spring Festival Travel Rush, the once striking scene was the "motorcycle army" on the streets of the Pearl River Delta and the Yangtze River Delta. For more than a decade in the past, hundreds of thousands of migrant workers rode motorcycles, with woven bags tied around their waists, carrying their wives and children on the back seats, crossing provincial borders in cold wind and freezing rain. It used to be a highly vivid scene, symbolizing diligence and tenacity, yet also full of the helplessness and danger of long-distance travel.
However, careful people will find that the "motorcycle army" is shrinking year by year. The change began around 2019. With the surge in private car ownership and the penetration of online carpooling platforms, the former "iron cavalry" began to sell their motorcycles in a planned way, or leave them in factory workshops, then turn to their mobile phones to find a ride heading in the same direction for their hometown trip.
This transformation is not only a reflection of rising income, but also an intergenerational leap in travel patterns. Behind the disappearance of the motorcycle army lies the awakening of tens of millions of users in the sinking market for "decent travel". On the 7th anniversary of the launch of Hello Hitch, Hello expects to generate more than 100 million travel demands during the 2026 Spring Festival Travel Rush. With a conversion rate of 50% to 60%, this means that more than 50 million people no longer have to endure severe cold or the trouble of multiple bus transfers, and can reach their doorsteps directly with one stop through the "fellow villager helping fellow villager" mode.
Jiang Tao, Senior Vice President of Hello, attributes this growth to "demand stimulation". From a sociological perspective, the rapid rise of hitchhiking has filled the "capillary zones" that public transport and online car-hailing cannot reach. For the "last 100 kilometers" problem from CBDs in first-tier cities to 18th-tier towns, hitchhiking is an effective socialized solution. In the past, due to the restrictions of trains and long-distance buses on live pets, pet owners often fell into "boarding anxiety" during the Spring Festival. Now, hitchhiking has made "going home with pets" change from a luxury to a rigid demand. At the same time, with the evolution of consumer psychology, people generally believe that hitchhiking is both consumption upgrade (more comfortable than buses, door-to-door service) and consumption downgrade (cheaper than premium online car-hailing services).
In the past seven years, when the growth rate of the online car-hailing market has dropped to less than 10%, the hitchhiking industry has maintained an average annual compound growth rate of about 40%. By 2025, the market size of online hitchhiking has exceeded 60 billion RMB, and is very likely to cross the 100 billion threshold in the past two years, which can be called an "invisible champion" ignored by the mainstream vision. It does not show off its strength, but is deeply embedded in the daily travel of some people, weaving a dynamically real-time matching travel network covering the whole of China every Spring Festival and every holiday.
Breakthrough of the Hitchhiking Model After Industry Growing Pains
The early development of the hitchhiking industry was full of ups and downs. Before 2019, affected by malignant safety accidents, the whole industry was once pushed to the forefront of public opinion, falling into a huge trust crisis and being trapped in stereotypes. The industry went through growing pains, and the public's idealized expectation for "shared travel" was replaced by fear and doubt. Hello entered the market against such a background. As the person in charge of the hitchhiking business, Jiang Tao, Senior Vice President of Hello and General Manager of Inclusive Business Division, said that the team was faced with the problem of how to find a mature implementation carrier and development path for such an idealized product as hitchhiking.
Hello chose a highly challenging path. In the Internet era of burning money for scale, Hello Hitch realized profitability from the first year of its launch, and has maintained a record of no losses for seven consecutive years. In Hello's view, hitchhiking needs to revitalize the marginal cost of private cars. Jiang Tao said frankly that hitchhiking is not innovation for innovation's sake, but to return to users and solve the pain points of the ecology and transactions themselves.
In the process of reconstructing rules, Hello has implemented the owner PK mode. For a long time, hitchhiking has adopted the "first come, first served" order selection mode. Although it gives owners great freedom, it has also spawned a gray industrial chain of plug-ins. A large number of malicious owners use illegal order grabbing software to take away high-quality orders instantly, then raise prices for passengers, force carpooling or even take detours, which seriously distorts the matching efficiency.
In order to fight against this distortion, Hello introduced the PK mode into the transaction link three years ago under huge pressure. This means that when multiple owners select an order at the same time, the system no longer simply judges "who is faster", but temporarily locks the order, and distributes it to owners with shorter distance, higher ride matching degree and better past performance evaluation through algorithms. "We made such an innovation, and suffered huge costs and losses in the initial stage. But we still persisted in doing it," Jiang Tao said.
This "self-inflicted hardship" intervention finally showed governance effects. After three years, the usage rate of plug-ins on Hello's platform has dropped by 2/3, the order completion rate has increased by about 6 percentage points, and more than 20 billion RMB of incremental revenue has been created for owners. Sacrificing short-term growth in exchange for ecological health has helped Hello stand out from the fiercely competitive market.
In addition to deepening technology, another card for Hello's breakthrough is open ecology — actively opening its own capacity and services to almost all mainstream traffic platforms. Five years ago, when Jiang Tao put forward the open strategy, there was widespread opposition inside the company, as people worried that it would "raise competitors". But Jiang Tao believes in the logic of the free market, and thinks that mutual transactions can make the whole market better. Facts have proved that this mindset has made Hello Hitch one of the very few travel service providers that can be "seen everywhere" on the whole network platforms such as WeChat, Alipay, AutoNavi, Didi, Tencent and Meituan.
This open mindset not only supports Hello to reach the top of the industry, but also prompts it to try to build a new industry consensus. In the face of persistent industry problems such as "exclusive ride turning into shared ride" caused by cross-platform order receiving, Hello actively calls on peers to establish an information sharing mechanism and a blacklist interworking platform. Moving from competition to co-governance is not only to solve technical problems such as inaccurate positioning or performance deviation, but also to rebuild a bridge of trust between data silos.
Seven Years of Dedicated Service, Creating Genuine Inclusiveness
Before Hello entered the market, about 80% of the transaction volume of hitchhiking was concentrated in urban areas, which was essentially a low-cost supplement to taxis and online car-hailing. However, in the past seven years, this order structure has reversed, and now cross-city and intercity transactions account for 60% to 70% of the total volume. This transformation means that hitchhiking has evolved from an urban transportation auxiliary tool to a "capillary network" woven into China's geography. It is no longer just a travel choice within the Fifth Ring Road, but has truly gone deep into counties, towns and even villages that are difficult for traditional public transport to reach.
In Jiang Tao's view, three forces have emerged on the demand side. The first is consumption upgrade based on "door-to-door" service. Hitchhiking completely breaks the restraint of the "station-to-station" mode of railway stations and passenger transport stations, making long-distance travel unprecedentedly smooth. The second is the consumption downgrade brought by extreme cost performance. In the current era of pursuing economic stability, hitchhiking has become an irreplaceable "affordable alternative to online car-hailing" for high-frequency intercity commuters. The last is consumption stimulation. Those potential demands that were originally "disappeared" due to extreme inconvenience of carrying pets, too heavy luggage or too remote routes have been reawakened under the flexible matching mechanism of hitchhiking.
In Hello's logic, "inclusiveness" has never been a grandiose rhetoric, but to put itself in the shoes of owners and passengers. Jiang Tao revealed a data: in the past seven years, Hello Hitch has distributed a total of hundreds of billions of RMB of revenue to owners.
For car owners, this money may be the milk powder money saved for their children, the medical expenses for their parents to see a doctor in the county, or the "emergency money" to pay off the mortgage and car loan.
In order to protect this simple sense of gain, Hello broke the industry-prevailing "weekly settlement" or even "monthly settlement" convention when it was launched in 2019, becoming the first and the only platform at that time to support car owners to withdraw cash at any time. Jiang Tao explained: "This money may not be so urgent for office workers like us who get monthly salary, but for many car owners, being able to put the money they earn firmly in their pockets every day is their most simple wish." Giving up the cash flow income of the platform and choosing to empathize with the owners has laid the foundation of trust on Hello's platform.
The far-reaching impact of inclusiveness is also reflected in a series of product designs for fine transformation of supply and demand balance. Take "comfortable carpooling" as an example, it is a balance point designed by Hello to solve the stubborn problem of "demand exists but no supply" on remote routes. On these routes, if passengers choose exclusive ride, the cost is too high, while if they choose traditional carpooling, the experience is extremely poor because owners are unwilling to take orders (the unit price is too low and troublesome).
Through the performance rule of "at most one more carpool passenger" and re-pricing logic, Hello has established a balance. Passengers get the certainty and comfort close to exclusive ride at a price much lower than exclusive ride, while owners are willing to drive to those previously neglected remote destinations because of higher single order revenue. The depth of this inclusiveness is to revitalize the originally shrinking and stagnant urban-rural mobility network through technology and mechanism. It allows every ordinary person to connect their hometown and city in a more decent way, and also allows every private car driving on urban and rural roads to get due labor dignity while traveling in the same direction.
Of course, although hitchhiking has achieved inclusive development in commercial logic, in actual operation, this model depends on the complex interweaving of technology and human care. Hitchhiking is not a standardized assembly line product, it highly depends on the contract spirit and mutual assistance consensus between car owners and passengers. When this idealized mutual assistance is placed in the real social scene, the gap between algorithms and reality begins to appear.
The most helpless pain point for passengers is the performance deviation caused by fragmented data. Some passengers confessed that they had paid for "exclusive ride" on Hello's platform, but found that there were already users from other platforms in the car after getting on the bus. Jiang Tao frankly analyzed the "island effect" behind it: due to the lack of effective data links between various travel platforms, Hello cannot grasp the real-time order receiving situation of car owners on other platforms, which makes it difficult for a single platform to achieve real closed-loop supervision. This situation leads to the supervision blind area of cross-platform transactions, which is also one of the root causes of chaos in the industry. In order to break this deadlock, Jiang Tao issued an initiative to invite peers to jointly establish an information sharing mechanism, hoping to eliminate violations as much as possible through joint efforts of the industry.
In addition, Hello has devoted a lot of energy to joint prevention and control of bad-behaving users. It is revealed that since its operation seven years ago, Hello has controlled tens of thousands of bad-behaving passengers and car owners in the "blacklist". However, due to data barriers, these users may be active on other platforms. Jiang Tao proposed that if the leading players in the industry can reach a consensus first and share these years of accumulated blacklist data after desensitization, it will not only greatly reduce the governance cost of the platform, but also purify the entire hitchhiking ecosystem.
Fellow Villager Helping Fellow Villager, the "Capillary Network" in the Spring Festival Travel Rush
In Hello's business review, Jiang Tao often quotes a story to explain the complexity of hitchhiking. A rural woman from an 18th-tier small town bought a box of citrus for 20 yuan on Pinduoduo. When she received the goods, she found that the express box was broken and one third of the citrus inside was rotten. Her first reaction was usually not anger, but joy, because she thought that for only 20 yuan, two thirds of the citrus were still edible, and the cost performance was extremely high. But for the same box of oranges, if it was sent to a white-collar worker who was used to high-end services and earned tens of thousands of yuan a month, it would most likely get an angry bad review.
The hitchhiking product is in this polarization of evaluation. For the real public outside the Fifth Ring Road, choosing hitchhiking can undoubtedly bring a decent travel experience; while those who pursue premium car-level standardized services think it is full of uncertainty. Jiang Tao believes that behind these perceptions, the essence of hitchhiking is reflected: it cannot, and does not try to satisfy everyone. The tear of public praise is a necessary "side effect" when a valuable product serves specific groups of people and pursues extreme cost performance. Hello firmly chooses to stand among the real public.
The product form of hitchhiking has been closely related to the Spring Festival Travel Rush since its birth. Facing this huge-scale periodic migration, no single public transport system can fully cover the instant explosive peak. Hello Hitchhiking has gradually grown into an indispensable supplementary capacity during the Spring Festival Travel Rush in the past seven years.
In the scenario of the Spring Festival Travel Rush, the value of hitchhiking has been maximized. It provides more targeted "one-stop direct" services than trains and planes, allowing young people carrying large luggage or even pets to avoid the toil of multiple transfers. This mutual assistance spirit of "fellow villager helping fellow villager" has been transformed into a guaranteed trip home with the support of algorithms. For hundreds of millions of loyal users, hitchhiking is their choice to go home decently during the Spring Festival Travel Rush.
After seven years of development, Hello Hitchhiking has served more than 300 million passengers, completed 3.6 billion orders, and has 38 million certified car owners. It allows people who did not know each other to reach a simple contract in the same car.
Looking to the future, this hitchhiking network expanded by the Spring Festival Travel Rush will bring more social value. In the process of rural revitalization, it will connect urban resources and town demands; in the coordinated development of regions, it can effectively revitalize social resources for cross-city commuting; and in the cultural and tourism flow during holidays, it provides more flexible and humanized travel solutions than traditional passenger transport.
The seven years of Hello Hitchhiking proves that technology can not only pursue efficiency, but also embrace the neglected demands outside the Fifth Ring Road. The once long and arduous Spring Festival travel road leading to hometown is becoming shorter and warmer with each hitchhiking order.