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Planet of the apps: Consumers shifting to transportation apps
Nizar Zulfikar, 23, a private company staff member, fiddles with his smartphone keypad to use an app to order a motorcycle taxi to take him to his workplace in Sudirman, South Jakarta
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izar Zulfikar, 23, a private company staff member, fiddles with his smartphone keypad to use an app to order a motorcycle taxi to take him to his workplace in Sudirman, South Jakarta.
Nizar said that since last month he had stopped using the conventional ojek (motorcycle taxi) service available on the streets and instead had started using the Go-Jek service to go to work and to return to his home every day.
'It is very reliable. I can avoid the traffic and the driver has a GPS so we won't get lost,' Nizar told The Jakarta Post on Tuesday.
He also said that the fixed price for each kilometer traveled made him more eager to use the service as he didn't have to bargain the price, which is usually the case with conventional ojek drivers.
The Go-Jek app is an increasingly popular app with which users can order an ojek to beat the traffic or even ask them to purchase food from stores and restaurants and deliver goods.
The start-up company behind the app, established in 2011, gives consumers information on the cost of the trip and later the driver's identity and location through GPS technology.
Indonesia's 88.1 million mobile Internet users, the sixth most numerous in the world according to the Indonesian Internet Service Providers Association (APJII), are observing an increasing trend to use mobile applications to access their means of transportation.
Even though means of transportation such as taxis and traditional ojek can be easily found on the streets, many customers have expressed their concern about their safety and the effort to haggle over the price of the transportation service.
Kartika, 25, an assistant researcher in a university, said that she chose to use the GrabTaxi app to order taxis for the safety and the ease.
'Sometimes the normal taxi in the street just refuses to take me because they think I live too far away or they just don't want to stop. With GrabTaxi, when they take me, they already know where I'm going. I also know who the driver is, the price and I feel safe,' she said.
She also lauded the trip history feature in the app, as she felt that if anything happened, she could give a evidence about the trip and the identity of the driver on the complaint.
She said she had been using the app for a total of six months.
GrabTaxi, which was founded under the name MyTeksi in 2012, is a taxi-booking application for smartphone users.
The start-up partnered with more than 50,000 taxi drivers in Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines. In Indonesia, they partnered with official taxis such as those from Express Group and Gamya among others.
The consumer shift toward the applications has not always been smooth as there has been resistance from conventional transportation drivers.
'I'm aware that the regular ojek drivers around my area look at me in a hostile way when I summon a Go-Jek driver to take me. One of the drivers also told me that he made some enemies in his area just because he joined the company,' said Nizar.
A Go-Jek user named Boris Anggoro also recently shared a post on his social media, which then went viral, about his experience summoning a driver from the app only to have the local ojek drivers threatening to beat the Go-Jek driver.
However, customers reap the benefits from the emergence of the apps as they now have more alternatives.
Kartika said that she still used regular taxi services when they were easy to find around her, such as in the malls where there is usually a pool of taxis.
'When I order a taxi with the GrabTaxi app, I have to wait for a while for the taxi to arrive. When I don't feel like doing that, I just grab the taxi in the street,' she said.
The operational manager of the Indonesian Consumer Foundation (YLKI), Tulus Abadi, said that the customers technology-based service compensated for the lack of quality in the service provided by mass transportation.
'It does make it easier for the consumers. However, it's a sign of the society's distrust of the existing means of transportation. An app like Go-Jek emerged because the government couldn't provide reliable mass transportation,' he said. (fsu/dmr)(+++)
