After more than a decade of development, Mobility as a Service has produced some genuinely impressive technology, a number of valuable pilots, and a growing body of evidence about what works and what does not. The multimodal routing is largely solved. The integrations exist. The apps are good. And yet the business model question, particularly for standalone consumer-facing platforms, provides unique challenges. Therefore it makes sense to integrate digital journey planning into wider transport related ecosystems: as Mobility as a Feature (Maaf).
We wrote about the conceptual distinction between MaaS and MaaF previously. Now, let’s analyse why MaaF is gaining traction, what it looks like in the wild, and why the business logic of embedding mobility into non-transport platforms is more compelling than ever.
Transport is not the product
The original MaaS proposition was straightforward: unify public transport, ride-hailing, bike-sharing and other modes into a single platform, ideally with a subscription model, and make owning a private car feel unnecessary. Noble goals. The execution, however, ran into a structural problem that no amount of venture capital could fix.
Transport is what economists call a derived demand. Nobody actually wants to “do a journey”. They want to get to work, visit a friend, attend a concert, pick up a prescription. The journey is an input, not an outcome. Building an entire business model around that input – and expecting users to pay a meaningful subscription for it – proved harder than anticipated. As research published in Transport Policy in early 2025 put it, the focus on transport service providers working together “appears to have been a major roadblock in progressing MaaS.”
MaaF, as originally articulated by Professor David Hensher and Sampo Hietanen, proposes a different starting point. Instead of building a transport platform and trying to attract users to it, you start with the activities people already care about, such as working, shopping, travelling, staying healthy, and make mobility one of the features embedded in those experiences. Transport moves from being the product to being the infrastructure that enables the product.
This is not a subtle semantic shift. It is a complete inversion of the business model.
The organisations best placed in this ecosystem are not transport companies
Here is the insight that the latest research makes clearest: the organisations with the best chance of making MaaF work are ones that have nothing to do with transport.
A survey published in late 2024, covering decision-makers across Australia, the US, the UK, Singapore, Sweden and Finland, identified a range of private sector and government initiatives already embedding sustainable travel incentives into broader service platforms. These included employers rewarding staff for using public transport on their commute, insurers offering reduced premiums to customers who cycle or walk rather than drive, retailers incentivising customers to arrive by public transport, and hotels integrating local transit options into the guest journey.
None of these are transport companies. All of them are already in a direct, trusted relationship with their customer. And all of them have a reason, commercial, regulatory or reputational, to care about how their customers travel.
This is the opportunity. It is not about building a new app. It is about leveraging existing customer relationships to change mobility behaviour, using services and incentives that go well beyond transport.
Consider a few of the sectors where this logic applies most directly:
Corporate mobility and employee benefits. Employers have perhaps the strongest lever of all. They interact with employees daily, they often contribute to travel costs already, and they are increasingly under pressure to report on Scope 3 emissions, which include employee commuting. An organisation that rewrites its travel policy to include multimodal journey planning – integrating public transport, cycling reimbursement, and car-sharing options alongside business travel – is doing MaaF, even if nobody calls it that. The transport element is a feature of the employment relationship.
Insurance. The IAG-led MaaS trial in Sydney, one of the most rigorous real-world tests of this kind, was not run by a transport agency. It was run by Australia’s largest general insurer. Insurers understand risk profiles, and how people travel is deeply relevant to those profiles. A motor insurer that can offer reduced premiums tied to reduced car use, while helping policyholders access alternatives, has both the commercial incentive and the data infrastructure to make this work.
Retail and hospitality. Footfall is one of the most expensive problems in retail. If a shopping centre or hotel can make it demonstrably easier for customers to arrive without a car, and reward them for doing so, it reduces car park infrastructure costs, improves the environmental credentials of the venue, and deepens the customer relationship. Last-mile connectivity becomes a feature of the brand, not a separate transport problem.
Healthcare. Transport is one of the most overlooked barriers to healthcare access, particularly for older adults and people in rural or suburban areas. Health systems and insurers in several markets are beginning to treat non-emergency medical transport as a care coordination problem, integrating journey planning into patient management platforms. The transport is the enabler; the health outcome is the product.
Why now?
Several forces are converging. First, years of real-world MaaS pilots have produced honest lessons about what standalone transport platforms can and cannot achieve commercially, shifting attention towards hybrid and embedded models. Second, the rise of super apps, most visibly Grab and Gojek in Southeast Asia, but also Uber’s gradual expansion beyond ride-hailing, has demonstrated that consumers are comfortable using a single platform for a wide range of activities, including transport. Third, corporate sustainability reporting requirements are creating genuine organisational incentives, not just good intentions, to track and influence how employees and customers travel.
And fourth, the technology infrastructure has matured significantly. This is perhaps the least-discussed but most enabling shift of all.
The technology layer of APIs and SDKs
One of the barriers that held MaaF back as an idea was the assumption that it would require enormous integration effort. For a non-transport company to embed journey planning into its platform, the thinking went, it would need to build or procure sophisticated routing engines, connect to hundreds of transport providers, handle real-time data, manage accessibility requirements, and navigate booking and payment complexity across multiple modes. That is a formidable project for a company whose core business is selling insurance or managing a shopping centre.
What has changed is the availability of mature, modular mobility APIs and SDKs that reduce this integration challenge dramatically. A company can now embed comprehensive, real-time, multimodal journey planning into an existing app or platform in a fraction of the time and cost that would have been required five years ago. The mobility intelligence sits in the background; the user experience is shaped around the host platform’s existing brand and customer journey.
This is where SkedGo’s approach has always been distinctive. Rather than positioning itself as the user-facing destination, SkedGo operates as the engine behind the experience. The TripGo API connects to over 4,000 transport service providers globally, handles multimodal routing, real-time data, accessibility, booking and payment, and surfaces all of this through a set of developer tools – APIs, SDKs for iOS and Android, a React SDK, and white-label products – that are designed to be embedded in someone else’s platform.
That is, by design, integration-ready architecture. The journey planning is the feature; the host application defines the context and the value proposition.
This is evident in how SkedGo’s partnerships have evolved. Working with Cubic on the Umo app, for example, was not about SkedGo becoming a consumer destination. It was about equipping an existing mobility platform with more sophisticated journey planning capabilities. Working with Feonix’s Catch-a-Ride programme in underserved US communities was about embedding connectivity into a social services context. In both cases, the mobility intelligence is a component of something larger.
The data dimension
One of MaaS’s persistent challenges was that transport data is of limited commercial interest to organisations outside the transport sector. Journey logs tell you how people travel, but not much else. The new model changes this. When transport is embedded in a broader activity platform, like an employment system, a retail loyalty programme, a health management tool, the journey data sits alongside purchase data, health data, work pattern data and engagement data. The contextual richness is far greater.
For employers managing mobility budgets, this means genuinely understanding how and why employees travel, and being able to design policies that change behaviour. For insurers, it means more sophisticated risk models. For healthcare organisations, it means identifying patients whose care plans are undermined by transport barriers.
The mobility layer, in other words, becomes more valuable when it is connected to the activity it was always meant to serve.
What this means in practice
None of this is to say it is simple to implement, or that every organisation should rush to embed a journey planner into their product. The research is clear that genuine integration requires alignment across technology, commercial incentives, regulatory frameworks, and consumer trust. Several of these remain genuine challenges.
But the direction of travel is clear. The organisations that will shape the next phase of mobility are not necessarily transit agencies or mobility startups. They are companies in insurance, retail, healthcare, corporate services and hospitality that are beginning to understand that how their customers and employees travel is both something they can influence and something worth influencing.
For those organisations, the practical question is not whether to build a transport platform. It is which partner can provide the mobility intelligence as a modular, embeddable component, one that works across transport modes and geographies, handles the complexity of real-time data and booking, and can be integrated without years of engineering effort.
That is precisely the problem a well-designed mobility API is built to solve.
Conclusion: Transport as infrastructure, not destination
The clearest lesson from a decade of MaaS development is that treating transport as the product is hard. Treating it as infrastructure for something else – employment, health, commerce, community – is, historically, how most successful transport innovation has actually worked. Roads were not built to enable the car industry. Public transit was not created to support fare box revenue. Both were built in service of the activities that matter to people.
Mobility as a Feature applies this logic to the platform era. It asks which organisations are already trusted by users, already motivated to influence travel behaviour, and already sitting on the data and customer relationships that could make integrated mobility commercially viable without ongoing public subsidy. The answer turns out to be a surprisingly wide range of companies that do not think of themselves as being in the transport business at all.
Making that possible, technically and commercially, is the work of the next few years. The conceptual groundwork has been laid. The technology infrastructure is in place. What comes next depends on whether organisations outside transport recognise the opportunity that is sitting in front of them.
SkedGo provides the journey planning technology behind some of the most innovative mobility platforms in the world. Our API, SDK and white-label products are designed to be embedded in existing applications, making multimodal mobility a feature of your platform rather than a platform of its own. Contact us to learn more.
This article was originally published by SkedGo.
