News

Startup Helps Visitors Explore Dubai Baggage-Free

The “Uber for luggage” service starts at Dh99 and offers collection, storage, and delivery.

Published

3 years ago

November 19, 2023

baggage taxi helps visitors explore dubai baggage-free

Dubai is a premiere location for millions of leisure and business visitors each year. Many travelers land during the early hours of the morning and have plenty of time to kill before they can check into their hotels.

Unfortunately, exploiting a city without accommodation means lugging bags between restaurants, tourist hotspots, and onto public transport. Luckily, Dubai resident Tristan Sommer-Enriquez has developed a solution — an on-demand, AI-powered baggage-hailing platform that is essentially the “Uber for luggage”.

Talking about his startup Baggage Taxi, Sommer-Enriquez explained: “As a business traveler, whenever I was in big metropolitan cities, I was stuck with my luggage everywhere I went. If I had meetings and left the hotel early, while my flight was in the evening, I had to return to the hotel or lug my baggage around. That was my life as a frequent traveler for the last 15-20 years”.

Baggage Taxi is a simple yet clever concept: Imagine a vacationing family plans to visit a mall before heading to the airport for their evening outbound flight. Baggage Taxi will whisk away their luggage from a convenient pickup point — such as their hotel — store and deliver it to the airport ready for check-in.

Also Read: How (And Why) To Start A Tech Business In Dubai

Although many tourists use locker services to solve this type of problem, Baggage Taxi is far more convenient, as travelers don’t need to catch a taxi back and forth into the city to collect their bags.

“Our customers typically arrive in the morning and check in at (hotels) at 3pm. So, we pick up their bags at the airport while they head to their meetings. The service is often chosen by departing customers with evening flights and no business meetings, so they don’t want to carry their luggage around while exploring or shopping. We pick up their baggage in the morning and deliver it to any airport or hotel in the UAE,” Sommer-Enriquez said.

Baggage Taxi costs Dh99 for the first piece of luggage and an additional Dh35 for each extra item. The company currently offers its service through its website and will release an app in early December 2023.

News

Microsoft Plans $10 Billion-Plus Gulf Expansion Despite Iran Conflict

Security is shaping Microsoft’s approach, from resilience work with governments to what it will say about how the money splits by country.

Published

4 days ago

September 24, 2026

Nour Nasir

Microsoft

Microsoft is planning more than $10 billion of investment across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait through 2030, Vice Chair and President Brad Smith told Reuters, calling the spending schedule aggressive. The Iranian conflict that began on February 28 has not persuaded the company to scale back.

“We’re sustaining all the investments we planned to make before this conflict started, and we are in fact adding to them,” Smith said. The $10 billion-plus total does not, however, show how large those additions are.

The investment, which Smith described as part of Microsoft’s continued infrastructure expansion, is aimed at cloud and AI infrastructure and at the company’s growing regional operations. Microsoft also intends to put more than $400 million into subsea and terrestrial connectivity across the Middle East by 2030.

The spending fits the region’s own ambitions too. Gulf governments have been investing heavily in AI infrastructure as part of a push to diversify their economies beyond oil and gas and turn themselves into global technology hubs. Major cloud and AI providers have been drawn in part by the land and relatively low-cost energy on offer.

Microsoft is widening its partnerships with regional AI companies, though not on identical terms. In 2024, it invested $1.5 billion in Abu Dhabi-based G42 for a minority stake, and Smith currently sits on G42’s board. Saudi Arabia’s Humain and Qatar’s Qai are working with Microsoft on selected priority areas, but Smith said the company does not plan to make capital investments in either.

Also Read: Egypt’s Mobile Wallets Are Booming, But Cash Still Has Power

The conflict has added another strand to Microsoft’s work in the region. Since it began, Smith said, the company has supported regional partners with digital resilience assessments, and it is now working with Gulf countries through a digital resilience initiative focused on preparedness and the protection of critical data.

So far, the company has given no country-by-country breakdown of the investment, citing security among other factors. So while the headline figure is public, how Microsoft divides the spending among the four countries is not.