The Maltese fleet business has changed shape
Ten years ago a Maltese cab operation was a family garage with a phone number. Then ride-hailing arrived — Bolt, Uber and local players competing for the same riders — and the economics flipped. Today a typical operator runs 5 to 50 Y-plate vehicles with drivers working across multiple platforms at once, often around the clock in season.
That shift quietly turned garage owners into fleet managers: multi-platform settlements every week, insurance and licensing paperwork per vehicle, drivers on rotating shifts, and cars that never cool down between them. The tooling most operators use — a spreadsheet and WhatsApp — hasn’t caught up with the business they now actually run.
What matters in software, seen from Malta
Most fleet software is built for American trucking or UK van fleets. Evaluating it from a Maltese ride-hailing operation, the priorities look different:
- Multi-platform driver settlements.Your drivers earn on Bolt and Uber in the same week, plus cash. If the software can’t split fares, tips and campaigns per platform and fold in car rent or fuel cards, you’ll still be doing payroll in a spreadsheet — see weekly settlements and our settlements guide.
- Document expiry alerts. Insurance, licences and inspections per vehicle, with warnings weeks ahead — not a diary entry (vehicle management).
- Tracking without hardware. On an island of short trips, wiring GPS boxes into every car is money down the drain. Phone-based shift trackinganswers the real question — who’s working right now — with zero installation. More in fleet tracking without GPS hardware.
- Damage evidence. When one car is shared by three drivers across a week, a photo check-in at every handover is the only fair way to assign a new scratch (damage & repairs).
GDPR, data residency and the EU question
Tracking drivers and processing their pay is personal-data processing, full stop. As a Maltese business you answer to the GDPR and Malta’s Data Protection Act, so two questions belong in every software evaluation:
- Where is the data hosted? EU hosting keeps you clear of cross-border transfer complications.
- Is tracking tied to work? Location sharing should run during shifts only — tracking employees around the clock is a compliance problem waiting for a complaint.
Rovora is EU-hosted, encrypted in transit and at rest, and tracks drivers only while they’re clocked in — the details are on our security page.
What it should cost
For a small fleet, pricing should scale with vehicles — not seats, not modules, not a “contact sales” form. As a sanity check: if software saves you four hours of settlement work a week and catches one missed renewal a year, it has paid for a per-vehicle subscription several times over. Rovora’s per-vehicle pricing is public, and the trial is free with no card.
The 10-minute evaluation checklist
Shortlisting tools? Put each one through these questions:
- Can it settle a driver who worked Bolt and Uber and took cash, in one payslip?
- Will it alert me three weeks before any insurance, licence or inspection expires?
- Can drivers clock in from a free app, with a photo of the car?
- Can I see who’s on shift right now, without installing hardware?
- Is my data hosted in the EU, and can I export it if I leave?
- Can I set a different pay deal per driver and have it apply automatically?
Six yeses and you’ve found your system. Rovora answers yes to all six — it was built for exactly this kind of fleet. Start with the free trial, or read how to run a taxi fleet for the full operational playbook.