Ho Chi Minh City under water stuns ride-hailers

D1 street in Ho Chi Minh City's Binh Thanh district at 8 AM on November 26. Source: vnexpress.net

Due to the impacts of storm Usagi, the ninth storm to hit Vietnam this year, Ho Chi Minh City has seen heavy rainfalls since Sunday (November 25), causing severe flooding and holding up traffic. Under these circumstances, residents increased the demands for taxi and ride-hailing services.

However, even as they are willing to pay twice or three times as much as usual for ride-hailing, thousands complained that they could not get a bike or car because the systems seemed to be disabled.

"I could not book a GrabBike, so I changed to GrabCar, which asked for double or even triple the price. In the evening, it took my colleague 2 hours to get a car from District 3 to Binh Thanh district and my boss had to wait until midnight to catch a GrabCar,” Thang Dang, a resident in District 3, said.

On Monday morning, it was still a struggle for residents to travel due to floods and continuous rains.

“I could not get any vehicles from Grab or GoViet. Normally, there are a lot of taxis parking down the apartment block, but there was none in this morning. Finally, I saw a taxi dropping down passengers nearby, and caught that one,” said Hong Ha, a resident in District 12, who wanted to get a vehicle to District 1 to work at 6:15 in the morning.

CEO of FastGo Nguyen Huu Tuat said the company witnessed a three-fold rise in booking demand, but there were not enough drivers willing to take on the weather.

VnExpress cited Grab confirming that the service was locally overloaded, “We understand that at several times we could not meet the demand of customers. We want to express our sincere apologies to our customers,” Grab’s representative said, adding that the company is deep grateful to the drivers and offered them a bonus of VND10,000 ($0.4) for each ride on Monday.

Food delivery service was in similarly difficult situation, as it could not satisfy customer demand because most delivery personnel took off due to bad weather.

Not increasing in price, GrabFood’s application was frequently out of service, while a large number of restaurants on the Grab app also refused to receive orders. In the meanwhile, users of Delivery Now could only place orders at restaurants within 4 kilometres and delivery times were excruciatingly slow.

“We did not allow users to apply promotion codes and even increased delivery price, but demand remains very strong,” said the CEO of a food-delivery service operator.

On the other hand, traditional taxi companies posted record revenue on Sunday thanks to their fixed service prices. VnExpress quoted Vinasun’s deputy general director Nguyen Bao Toan as saying that travel demand by taxi has raised dramatically in Sunday afternoon and evening, and the company’s staff had devoted all of their energy to support customers.

It is estimated that the company’s revenue in Ho Chi Minh City on Sunday alone has increased by three to four times against normal performance.

“More than 90 per cent of our cars work during peak hours, while the remainder stopped working because the drivers have passed their sales targets and some of our vehicles were damaged by flood water. The company has a garage to repair slightly damaged cars, while the more serious ones will have to wait for the appraisal by the insurance company,” said Toan.

As of Monday afternoon, taxi and delivery services returned to normal, and the number of customer complaints decreased gradually, apart from some areas that are still flooded or congested.