Grab’s new traveller features target the upcoming tourist boom

To support key incoming markets, the Grab app is available in Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. And in popular cities in Indonesia, Vietnam and Thailand, the GrabFood team has also made local food outlets more accessible to international tourists with translated menus in English. Chinese menus are also coming soon to some Indonesian cities.

This is because the team observed that tourists are increasingly using multiple services on our superapp. In Bali for example, we saw the traveller contribution to our food delivery sales grow from around 10 per cent to about 15 per cent between December 2022 and March 2023.

Work continues on expanding the list of supported cities with translated menus, so more travellers can order a meal easily to their hotels.

Integrations: Supporting Chinese travellers with WeChat

For users who are coming into Southeast Asia without the Grab app, we recently launched new third-party integrations, to introduce them to the Grab experience in an app they already have.

In December 2022, we formed a partnership with WeChat to integrate Grab services directly onto the Chinese superapp.

The Grab Mini Program (Grab境外叫车) gives WeChat users access to Grab’s ride-hailing services in more than 500 cities across eight Southeast Asian countries.

Users can also pay their fares via WeChat Pay in Chinese yuan through the Mini Program.

WeChat is practically ubiquitous in mainland China, with 1.31 billion monthly active users as of Q3 2022.

Outside of WeChat, Android users can download the app for their devices, because many in mainland China don’t have access to the Google Play Store. This is planned to help users set up their Grab accounts before arriving in Southeast Asia.

China was a top contributor of foreign tourism arrivals to Southeast Asia before Covid-19 hit, with some 32 million coming through in 2019—a figure that is almost a quarter of the region’s total arrivals. Grab’s data also shows that Chinese travellers formed the largest group of non-Southeast Asian people using the Grab app that year.

With China’s borders finally reopened, figures also show that this popularity is not waning and Chinese travellers now favour travelling to Southeast Asia over other places.

Kakao integration

KakaoTalk is to South Korea what WeChat is to mainland China. It has more than 47 million active users within the country and 53 million globally, and is by far the most widely used app by South Koreans.

In 2022, we partnered with Kakao to allow users to use the Kakao T app—its transportation service—to access Grab services across eight Southeast Asian countries. Users can specify their departure and destination information, then have it translated into the local language automatically.

Riding beyond Southeast Asia

Our added capacity to support overseas users also applies to outbound travellers going out of Southeast Asia, and it is something Grab has been pouring effort into even before the pandemic.

In 2019, we partnered Splyt Technologies (recently acquired by Kakao) to let Grab users book rides in Japan and the Middle East.

This opens access to five Japanese cities (Tokyo, Kyoto, Sapporo, Nagoya and Okinawa) and 94 cities across 13 Middle Eastern nations, and is available to Grab users in Singapore and the Philippines. Ride bookings in Japan are fulfilled by JapanTaxi, while those in the Middle East are fulfilled by Careem.

With Grab’s in-app messaging feature that translates, passengers and drivers can also communicate with each other in their preferred languages.