Ho Chi Minh City, 9 May 2017 — Grab, the leading ride-hailing platform in Southeast Asia, today officially launched GrabShare, Vietnam’s first on-demand commercial carpooling solution in Ho Chi Minh City. GrabShare relies on existing GrabCars to provide passengers up to 30% cheaper rides from standard GrabCar fares while helping drivers earn more by completing two passenger bookings in a single trip. By encouraging passengers to share their car ride, GrabShare matches two bookings in one trip to maximize a vehicle’s capacity, thus reducing the number of cars needed to help ease congestion and reduce carbon emissions.

GrabShare uses GrabCar (private hire car-hailing) to provide the company’s fourth transport option in Vietnam and complements GrabTaxi (taxi-hailing) and GrabBike (private hire motorbike-hailing). GrabShare is testament to Grab’s commitment to developing tailored solutions to solve local transport challenges and improve people’s lives.

Conceptualized, designed and engineered across Grab’s research and development centers in Singapore, Seattle and Beijing, GrabShare’s matching algorithm ensures passengers get to their destinations in the shortest possible time. The algorithm calculates and determines a match by factoring the closest available drivers, travel time, overlap of trip routes, detour distance and current traffic conditions before intuitively sequencing pick-ups and drop-offs.

“GrabShare gets our passengers to carpool to their destinations with a more pocket-friendly fare with minimal detours, while reducing the need to add more cars on our roads by using our existing pool of GrabCar drivers. We are proud to deliver Vietnam’s first-ever commercial carpooling solution that we have continuously iterated and improved to provide Southeast Asia’s best carpool experience for passengers and drivers. We are confident GrabShare enables us to meet Vietnam’s growing passenger demand for more affordable, on-demand transportation while helping our drivers earn more,” said Jerry Lim, Grab Vietnam’s Country Head.

To get passengers quickly to their destinations, GrabShare pairs just two passenger bookings with similar trip routes within a single trip. Passengers will only experience a maximum of two stops before reaching their destinations. For example, if Passenger A commences the ride and is paired with Passenger B, depending on the more efficient trip route, Passenger A may make a first stop to pick-up Passenger B and a second to drop-off Passenger B.

First introduced in Singapore last December, GrabShare is being progressively launched across Southeast Asia and is now also available in the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia. GrabShare has proven effective in attracting more new riders to the Grab platform. In the five months since its first launch, Grab has completed more than 8 million GrabShare rides, for a total distance of over 72 million kilometers. Along with the rapid passenger adoption of GrabShare, Grab has seen an improvement in passenger matching rate by 50 per cent in the three new cities that launched GrabShare in 2017. GrabShare is also helping to increase driver monthly incomes by 15 per cent on average. 

“Our goal is to make on-demand transportation readily available and affordable that people no longer want to purchase and maintain a vehicle for their personal use. GrabShare enables our drivers to serve more passengers especially during peak hours when demand can be three times higher than usual. Starting today, passengers can choose between four transport services – GrabTaxi, GrabCar, GrabBike and GrabShare – to suit their travel preferences, time and budget,” said Jerry Lim.

Following the launch in Ho Chi Minh City, GrabShare will next be beta-tested in Hanoi to help ease traffic congestion and provide more affordable transport options to passengers. With a launch expected in June, Hanoi will be the sixth city where GrabShare is available.

Today, Grab is supported by over 870,000 drivers in 50 cities across 7 countries, which includes its recent expansion into Yangon, Myanmar. With over 43 million mobile downloads of the Grab app to-date, Grab is now moving into mobile payments with GrabPay, its in-app cashless payment platform.

Grab recently announced its new Research and Development (R&D) center in Ho Chi Minh City to capitalize on the thriving pool of engineering talent in the country and to play a role in providing Vietnamese talent with more opportunities.

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About Grab

Grab is Southeast Asia’s leading ride-hailing platform. Grab solves critical transportation challenges to make transport freedom a reality for 620 million people in Southeast Asia. Grab’s core product platform includes commuting solutions for drivers and passengers with an emphasis on convenience, safety and reliability, as well as its proprietary mobile payments platform, GrabPay. Grab currently offers services in Singapore, Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam and Myanmar. For more information, please visit: http://www.grab.com.