Initial Gojek thoughts: low fares, some weirdness

You’d have to be living under a rock not to know that Gojek has arrived in Singapore, at least for DBS/POSB cardholders. Entering the first 6 digits of a DBS/POSB credit/debit card in the Gojek app puts you on the beta program waitlist, and you get $5 off your first 2 rides once approved.

I got approved after a 10 day wait, and was eager to try the service out. The great thing is that for the moment, Gojek does not have surge pricing. Obviously, that’s not going to be sustainable in the long term and ultimately surge pricing will rear its ugly, multiplier head. But for now, you can feel smug about getting a single digit fare during peak hours where every other service is surging into the stratosphere.

Gojek’s current UI is clean and simple

For those of you who haven’t used Gojek, here’s what the booking interface looks like when you launch the app:

It’s a no-nonsense, simple and intuitive interface, which shouldn’t be surprising given the service is still in beta. Gojek hasn’t grown into the multi-armed behemoth that Grab is in Singapore, and for now it offers one service and one service only: Go-Car. I’m sure this will eventually get more cluttered as new services are launched.

The menus are likewise simple- you can view your account, your ride history, access the help menu and check your vouchers.

Getting a vehicle is surprisingly cheap and easy…

There’s a lot to like here. No surge pricing means Gojek is cheap. There’s nothing quite like seeing an $11 fare from Orchard to the airport (after the $5 discount). When it comes to availability, I imagine that Gojek is limiting the number of people participating in the beta, so it’s relatively easy to get a ride.

What I also like is that unlike other apps, which every so often tell you the sad fact that no one wants to take you, Gojek has yet to fail me. In a way it reminds me of good ol’ Uber- it might take a while, but the app will eventually get you a driver. Whether or not this remains the case after the service scales up remains to be seen, of course. 

Once your ride is assigned, you’ll see your driver’s location and be able to track him/her en route. Just like Ryde when it started out, Gojek has some annoying issues with location tracking. Very often there would be no movement in the car icon at all, followed by a jump in position.

You have the option to call or in-app message your driver to coordinate pickup. Do note that Gojek does not have anonymized numbers for now– when you press the button to call your driver, you see his/her full number appear on your dialing app. I can only assume your driver sees the same.

…but either Gojek is really buggy, or some drivers are gaming the incentive system

So here’s my Gojek experience so far.

My first Gojek ride was actually relatively alright. I had to cancel my first two matches because they were 20 minutes away (there’s no discernible cancellation penalty at the moment, which only seems fair because the algorithm doesn’t do a great job matching you by distance), but third time’s the charm and I got a lovely, polite driver who got me from point A to B with no drama.

My second ride, however, was just flat out weird. It was approaching 9 pm when I called for a ride from Orchard to Lornie Road. The first driver who I got started driving further and further away from me. I chalked it up as an inexperienced driver and cancelled after watching him for 10 minutes.

The second driver, however, just stood still in the same place without moving.

Ok, I thought. Maybe it’s a GPS tracking issue and I should wait to see if the icon suddenly jumps. 10 minutes went by and nothing happened.

Ok, I thought. Maybe there’s the mother of all jams in that area which means total gridlock. So I pulled up Google Maps…

…but it was smooth sailing as far as I could see.

I tried calling the driver, but no one picked up. The normal thing would be to cancel and try again, but I thought something was fishy and wanted to see where it went. So I bit the bullet and got a TADA instead, while keeping my Gojek booking active.

My TADA arrived at 9.40pm, and no prizes for guessing where my Gojek driver was…

But here’s where it gets interesting. My TADA driver told me that in order to encourage drivers to ply the roads, Gojek was offering sizable compensation if they went an hour without getting any passengers. So some drivers were doing things like deliberately driving the wrong way, or camping in one spot hoping that passengers would cancel on them (because that would still count as no job, and therefore qualify for the incentive). Now I can’t verify if that’s true, but it would certainly explain the behaviour I was seeing, assuming the compensation outweighed their average net earnings per hour.

I got home past 10, ate a late dinner and about 40 minutes later, my driver started replying to my messages…

I…suppose that could be plausible too. Drivers aren’t allowed to take calls while they’re fetching passengers, so that could well have been what happened in this particular instance, assuming the app really did double book him as he’s suggesting.

But either way it’s not good- there’s either significant bugs lurking in the Gojek app, or the driver incentive system is creating unintended consequences. Whatever the case, I hope Gojek sorts them out, and quickly.

Conclusion

Like every new service, Gojek is bound to have some teething issues. For now, the rock bottom fares are enough to make most people (myself included) look the other way. I seem to recall Ryde going through some similar struggles when it first started in the market, but you’d hope that a company with the pedigree of Gojek will be able to sort these out double time.

I’ve been using my DBS Woman’s World Mastercard with Gojek because I assume that nets me 4 mpd. I see no reason why it shouldn’t, but I’ll only know for sure next month. As the program expands beyond DBS there’ll be opportunities to test other possible 10X cards like the Citibank Rewards Visa and Citibank Rewards Mastercard.

Have you joined the Gojek beta? Noticed anything strange so far?

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