Guiding you Door-to-Door via our Superapp!
Tags: Apps, Tech, Data, Maps

By Neeraj Mishra , Lara PuReum Yim , Sufyan Selamet , Nagur Hassan & Summit Saurav

Remember landing at an airport or going to your favourite mall and the hassle of finding the pickup spot when you booked a cab? When there are about a million entrances, it can get particularly annoying trying to find the right pickup location!

Rolling out across Southeast Asia is a brand new booking experience from Grab, designed to make it easier for you to make a booking at large venues like airports, shopping centers, and tourist destinations! With the new booking flow, it will not only be easier to select one of the pre-designated Grab pickup points, you can also find text and image directions to help you navigate your way through the venue for a smoother rendezvous with your driver!

Inspiration behind the work

Finding your pick-up point closest to you, let alone predicting it, is incredibly challenging, especially when you are inside huge buildings or in crowded areas. Neeraj Mishra, Product Owner for Places at Grab explains: “We rely on GPS-data to understand user’s location which can be tricky when you are indoors or surrounded by skyscrapers. Since the satellite signal has to go through layers of concrete and steel, it becomes weak which adds to the inaccuracy. Furthermore, ensuring that passengers and drivers have the same pick-up point in mind can be tricky, especially with venues that have multiple entrances. “

Grab’s data analysis revealed that “rendezvous distance” (walking distance between the selected pick-up point and where the car is waiting) is more than twice the Grab average when the booking is made from large venues such as airports.

To solve this issue, Grab launched “Entrances” (the green dots on the map) last year, which lists the various pick-up points available at a particular building, and shows them on the map, allowing users to easily choose the one closest to them, and ensuring their drivers know exactly where they want to be picked up from. Since then, Grab has created more than 120,000 such entrances, and we are delighted to inform you that average of rendezvous distances across all countries have been steadily going down!

One problem remained

But there was still one common pain-point to be solved. Just because a passenger has selected the pick-up point closest to them, doesn’t mean it’s easy for them to find it. This is particularly challenging at very large venues like airports and shopping centres, and especially difficult if the passenger is unfamiliar with the venue, for example — a tourist landing at Jakarta Airport for the very first time. To deliver an even smoother booking and pick-up experience, Grab has rolled out a new feature called Venues — the first in the region — that will give passengers in-app photo and text directions to the pick-up point closest to them.

Let’s break it down! How does it work?

Whether you are a local or a foreigner on holiday or business trip, fret not if you are not too familiar with the place that you are in!

Let’s imagine that you are now at Singapore Changi Airport: your new booking experience will look something like this!

Step 1: Fire the Grab app and click on Transport. You will see a welcome screen showing you where you are!

Step 2: On booking screen, you will see a new pickup menu with a list of available pickup points. Confirm the pickup point you want and make the booking!

Step 3: Once you’ve been allocated a driver, tap on the bubble to get directions to your pick-up point!

Step 4: Follow the landmarks and walking instructions and you’ve arrived at your pick-up point!

Curious about how we got this done?

Data-driven Decisions

Based on a thorough data analysis of historical bookings, Grab identified key venues across our markets in Southeast Asia. Then we dispatched our Operations team to the ground, to identify all pick up points and perform detailed on-ground survey of the venue.

Operations Team’s Leg Work

Nagur Hassan, Operations Manager at Grab, explains the process: “For the venue survey process, we send a team equipped with the tools required to capture the details, like cameras, wifi and bluetooth scanners etc. Once inside the venue, the team identifies strategic landmarks and clear direction signs that are related to drop-off and pick-up points. Team also captures turn-by-turn walking directions to make it easier for Grab users to navigate — For instance, walk towards Starbucks and take a left near H&M store. All the photos and documentations taken on the sites are then brought back to the office for further processing.”

Quality Assurance

Once the data is collected, our in-house team checks the quality of the images and data. We also mask people’s faces and number plates of the vehicles to hide any identity-related information. As of today, we have collected 3400+ images for 1900+ pick up points belonging to 600 key venues! This effort took more than 3000 man-hours in total! And we aim to cover more than 10,000 such venues across the region in the next few months.

This is Only the Beginning

We’re constantly striving to improve the location accuracy of our passengers by using advanced Machine Learning and constant feedback mechanism. We understand GPS may not always be the most accurate determination of your current location, especially in crowded areas and skyscraper districts. This is just the beginning and we’re planning to launch some very innovative features in the coming months! So stay tuned for more!