MANILA — Ridesharing firm Grab Philippines is seeking to impose a cancellation fee on its riders as part of measures to prevent the cancellation of booked trips.
“We are reviewing to impose (a) cancellation fee for the riders. For sure, we can implement it for credit card users. The challenge we encounter is for riders paying in cash,” Grab country marketing head Cindy Toh said in a press conference in Makati City on Tuesday.
“When Uber was implementing it, there was friction between drivers in terms of connecting. We are reviewing that and will be rolling it out as soon as we have the solution,” Toh added.
Uber used to charge a fee on riders who cancel trips, which they will have to pay on their next trip, before its ride-hailing operations in the country were halted last April due to its acquisition by Grab.
Grab is imposing a maximum cancellation of one trip per day as part of incentives for its drivers.
Currently, its drivers cancel 8 percent of their trips while passengers cancel 12 percent of their rides.
The ridesharing company seeks to reduce the rate of driver cancellation by 4 percent, and passenger cancellation by 6 percent under its 100-day plan to improve driver behavior and welfare, provide better ride experience, and upgrade customer support.
Under the initiative, Grab will enhance the performance incentives it offers to drivers to motivate them to provide quality services to its riders. Top performing drivers will be rewarded based on their number of rides, high rating, and good feedback from passengers.
Grab is also considering to implement a breakdown on its fares to ensure transparency of its operations.
“We are working already a breakdown of the fare on the receipt. I have a team that is working on revising the receipt that you get. On the new receipt, you should be able to see the surge rate and the base fare, how many kilometers traveled. That is already a work in progress,” Toh said in an interview with reporters on the sidelines of the launch of the campaign.
“We just have tech constraints. We will be rolling it out. Our target is this will also be implemented within the 100 days,” she said.
Grab implemented the masking of passenger destinations last April 27, which was initially rolled out to 25 percent of Grab drivers with historically low acceptance rate.
It has also activated an auto-accept feature that will automatically allocate trips to drivers allowing a more seamless experience in continuously accepting passenger requests.
Grab has maintained that the main reason for the difficulty in booking a ride is the lack of cars, resulting in low supply.
The company is appealing to the Land Transportation Franchising and Regulatory Board (LTFRB) to increase the supply cap of 65,000 transportation network vehicle service units in Metro Manila.
Grab said that it receives about 600,000 passenger booking requests per day but only 35,000 vehicles are available to serve its riders.
The suspension of the PHP2-per-minute travel charge by the LTFRB has caused a shortage in the supply of vehicles, leading to longer waiting time or non-allocation of rides according to the firm. (Aerol John Pateña with reports from Madonna Actub, OJT/PNA)
