Grab app prompts travellers to airport pick-up points

Grab’s photo and text directions feature isn’t new. We started offering Venues in 2019 and now cover 4,000 locations such as malls, hotels and office buildings across the region.

But the older version offered directions after a user booked a ride. The operations team realised during research that travellers preferred to be given directions before a booking instead.

Lead product manager, Hann Lam Woo, said the team found that the earlier implementation didn’t get as much traction. Studying user behaviour helped them discover that the visibility of the feature was blocked because users were only being prompted after booking a ride.

An airport survey conducted by Grab in October also found that users tend to book their rides only after they have arrived at the pick-up point, said transport product manager, Winston Goh.

While ride-hailing apps emerged among the top three transport modes to get out of the airport, people preferred traditional taxis lines, because survey respondents said they found locating pick-up points a top challenge when it comes to using ride-hailing services.

Building the Venues and Meeting Points features

Grab’s operations team started to identify a list of key venues in Southeast Asia by analysing historical booking data.

Team members were then dispatched to carry out a detailed survey of each venue in order to identify landmarks and signs that are useful in guiding users to respective pick-up points. They captured images and documented walking directions that would help users navigate complex buildings, such as shopping malls with multiple entrances.

The Venues feature builds on earlier work to identify specific pick-up points so driver-partners and end-users would have a clear point to meet at. Called Meeting Points, this helps to address users selecting points along the road which might be unsafe for driver-partners to stop at, or if users in buildings are unable to locate a precise pick-up location because they’re out of GPS coverage.

When a user books a ride, various nearby Meeting Points are displayed as green dots on the map around them, and users can toggle among the points to choose the most convenient spot.

This feature started rolling out in 2018 to help users accurately select their desired pick-up point and reduce driver-partners’ wait time. Since then, we have introduced over 250,000 of these points across the region.

Together with Meeting Points, the updated Venues feature aims to improve the overall travel experience from the moment a user arrives at the airport.