CHENNAI: The city’s teeming market of cab users will now be able to cut down costs by as much as 50 per cent, courtesy market leader Ola. The firm officially launched its cab-pooling service, Ola Share, in the southern metro on Saturday morning.
Carpooling as a concept is deceptively simple and as old as the first automobiles. But firms providing car-pooling services have failed to perform as well as expected in the Indian market - primarily due to car owners not being open to putting up with the inconveniences of taking along strangers for a ride, said an executive in a car-pooling facilitator firm.
Ola Share and UberPool, its only competitor, are different however. They offer customers the option of sharing cabs - a segment in which the user is already traveling in a car not his/her own. The economic benefits offered by sharing a cab with someone else, has seen both services receive a substantially bigger response from users.
Ola Share, unlike UberPool, also allows customers the option of sharing cabs with specified social circles - like office or college mates, and even custom groups. “The choice to travel with people they are comfortable with, even if they don’t actually know them, is what we are giving them,” Anand Subramanian, Senior Director of Marketing Communications, told Express.
Ola has pipped Uber in the launch of their cab-sharing service in Chennai, and as of Saturday, it had opened the service to over 40% of its user base in the city. The rest will see the service made available in a phased manner. The primary benefit to the customer is the prodigious decrease in cab rates.” We have been operating the platform in four cities so far and Chennai is the fifth. In all of them, we are seeing high adoption rates because of a simple thing - significantly cheaper fares per person. Ola Share fares can be up to 50 - 60% lower than normal,” said Subramanian. Ola is also offering a flat 50% discount on all Ola Share rides for the first month.
As for drivers on the platform, they get their own incentive to ply on the sharing category - they can choose not to. If Ola is to be believed, drivers in the four other cities where Ola Share has been operational so far have seen earnings increase from 25 - 30%. “It offers a lot more utilisation of time for the driver with all the consequent financial benefit. We are seeing drivers and their cabs occupied consistently,” said Subramanian.
But how does it work? Ola Share has just become another tab on the Ola app that users tap to access. Users are then prompted to select the group to which they want to share a cab. They can register themselves into office and college social groups. Alternatively, they can request Ola to create a custom group. Customers not shy of traveling with strangers can select the ‘All’ option.
For Ola, which began operations in Chennai in 2013, the city is the second fastest growing market after Bengaluru. Chennai will be the fifth city to get Ola Share, after Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Bengaluru. The firm is set to expand the offering to 20 cities across the country over the next six months.