Grab says PH drivers to earn more from upcoming app tweaks

MANILA  -Driver-partners of Grab Philippines will be able to identify areas with high demand for ride-hailing bookings in real time soon with the launch of a new feature designed to maximize daily earnings.

Prashant Kumar, Grab head of product fulfillment, said in a virtual briefing on Friday that Hotspot Navigation feature was set to go live this year.

It is currently being pilot-tested in Singapore, registering 85 percent success rate. Most of the Grab drivers, with the aid of this tool, can receive bookings within five minutes.

“Hotspot Navigation predicts demand hotspots based on real-time demand data,” Kumar said.

“It identifies high-demand areas nearest to a particular driver-partner and sends them personalized messaged to alert them to it,” he explained.

The Grab official said this feature could improve the earning capability of the company’s driver partners.

“Earning is one of the most important factors our driver-partners care about. They want to earn as much as they can whenever they are working on the platform,” he said.

Apart from this, Grab has already rolled out features to make its driver-partners’ tasks easier, including sharing of passengers’ live location to enable quicker pick-ups.

The super app operator also enables back-to-back bookings to minimize idle time between rides.

“We should help our partners to be as productive as possible,” Kumar said.

More productive

With these features set, Grab said that average idle time for drivers had dropped by 3.55 percent last year compared with 2021. Average earnings per hour, meanwhile, improved by 10 percent during the same period.

The dominant four-wheel ride-hailing company has been enlisting more drivers since the resurgence of mobility, even looking at allocating slots in the provinces. However, it has yet to achieve the prepandemic fleet of 65,000 drivers.

Grab recently laid off 1,000 employees across Southeast Asia as part of restricting activity. Some of these came from Philippine operations.

Still, the company said it remained committed to fulfilling its goal of providing 500,000 job opportunities in the country.

The local ride-hailing market has been dominated by Grab after taking over competitor Uber in 2018. However, two players—low-cost carrier AirAsia Philippines and California-based ride-hailing company InDrive—are now trying to break into the sector as they apply for license to operate. INQ