This New Egyptian App Lets You Ask Travellers to Bring Back Your International Deliveries with Them

"Is anyone coming from (insert first world country) soon? I need something urgently," is a social media status update that never seems to go out of style. But it's only fair, because our options for getting any goodies delivered from another country are either have someone (preferably a friend) deliver it to us, or find out we're the illegitimate children of Naguib Sawiris, in which case we could probably afford the ridiculous shipping expenses offered by most global delivery services.

With that obvious gap in supply and demand on cheaper and more efficient delivery services, Hitchhiker comes in to revolutionise the concept of international delivery once and for all. "Hitchhiker is a social networking platform to connect shippers who want to use an alternative way to Aramex, DHL, or FedEx to send/receive anything to save money & time, with travellers who have empty space in their luggage and want to make money while travelling," reads Hitchhiker's description.

"I love travelling; I've been to 35 countries and over a 100 cities. The most common thing about my travels was my friends asking me to bring them something from here or there, and I'd always read on social media about people wanting to get stuff delivered from abroad," says Hitchhiker's founder Hussien El-Terawy. "After a while, Hitchhiker began developing in my head until I finally started working on it in 2015. It took a while to come up with an efficient process that guarantees easy and cheap shipping. Quickly everything came together and we launched Hitchhiker 20 days ago. We've since had 1,600 subscribers just with the help of word-of-mouth".

El-Terawy further explained the simple process of shipping and delivery: "It's very simple. If you're a shipper, you simply upload details about your shipment and cities of pickup and destination. If you're a traveller, you upload details about your flight. And if your details match, you also match on the app, and you get to the second step; which is negotiating on the price, determining pickup and delivery locations".  

The app initially focused on people who want to send things to someone else in another country. But El-Terawy quickly altered the focus by including anyone who wants to get something delivered to themselves anywhere, "If you decide to buy something from London for instance, you get your British traveller's home address and have your package delivered there, and they will, in turn, deliver it to you". 

Since there's money involved, security must be established. According to El-Terawy, Hitchhiker secures transactions and ensures accurate delivery by sending an automatically-generated QR Code to the shipper, which he/she shares with the receiver. The traveller scans the QR Code on the receiver's phone after the delivery is completed, announcing a completed delivery. 

The fee of the delivery is estimated based on the package's weight, distance, dimensional package and value. The senders could always negotiate a 30-50% discount with the travellers. Hitchhiker charges a flat rate of 2$ for shippers and 0.5$ for receivers.

We couldn't be more excited about this brilliant new app, but we'll surely miss the thrilling suspense of trying to lure someone from Facebook to deliver some foreign-ass goodies to us.

Checkout Hitchhikers' website and download the app here.