Virgin Atlantic today announced a unique initiative which will help its passengers find other travellers to share taxi rides into city centres across the world � saving both their wallets and ground carbon emissions. The Taxi2 website will help match passengers who are on the same flight or whose flights arrive at a similar time and are travelling to a similar part of a city, so they can share the taxi ride.

Passengers will simply need to log onto http://www.taxi.to and input their flight and destination details eg. hotel address and the website will match them with a suitable travelling companion. They are then sent the details of the matched traveller and can decide whether to agree to the match and make arrangements of where to meet following their flight. They then print off the easy to make Taxi2 sign from the website so they can locate each other at the airport. The system will also match female travellers who also only want female travelling companions. The scheme is not limited to Virgin Atlantic customers and passengers on other airlines can share rides also.

Dee Cooper, Director of Product and Service, Virgin Atlantic, commented;

"We are always looking at ways to help improve our passengers’ journeys and this is a simple initiative which helps them to connect in a clever way. We expect this scheme to be popular with our passengers."

Ed Maklouf, the Taxi2 founder, said:

"We are delighted to be partnering with Virgin Atlantic for this scheme, and our expectation is that this simple, sensible way or saving money and cutting down congestion and carbon footprint will become common activity for air travellers worldwide."

The initiative was born out of Virgin Atlantic’s VJAM programme which is an Open Innovation initiative with NESTA, the UK’s National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (http://www.nesta.org.uk/v-jam/). The airline recently hosted the VJAM event to find new innovative initiatives which its passengers would benefit from. This initiative is just one of many that came out of the VJAM programme. VJAM is about co-innovating with Virgin Atlantic’s passengers and it blends topics that our customers are interested in with opportunities that make travel more social. Other VJAM initiatives will be released over the following months. See http://www.virginatlantic.com/innovationzone for details.

For further information please contact the Virgin Atlantic Press Office on 01293 747373 or log onto http://www.virginatlantic.com

Notes to Editors

About NESTA

NESTA is the largest independent endowment in the UK. Its mission is to support innovation to drive economic recovery and solve some of the UK's major social challenges. NESTA is a world leader in its field and is in a unique position to support and promote innovation through a blend of practical programmes, policy and research and investment in early-stage companies.

www.nesta.org.uk