Grab follows the old ‘Air Asia’ playbook with its online booking scam

Wee Choo Keong who operates a ‘corruption buster website’ that the MCMC doesn’t like discovered an old scam used by Air Asia until the Malaysian Aviation Commission (MAVCOM) stopped the practice.

Grab has started inserting a ‘compulsory’ 30 sen insurance charge on the rises booked through its app. Customers will only see the charge on their receipt from the driver after arriving at their destination. For the first time you use the app, the charge will appear on the bill. You are only able to opt out of this charge in future bookings by clicking on the line below the charge (opt out here) on the receipt.

This line would be difficult to see if you are getting out of a vehicle and heading out to your date, meeting, flight, or shopping trip etc.

From this point of view as Wee says, this is deceptive and a tricky charge for users to opt out of. The same thing happened with Air Asia booking in the past. Items such as insurance would appear on the charging page to be included in the payment, unless you saw the extra charges and disabled them before you paid.

Wee Choo Keong X

Wee looked at the potential extra revenue that might come Grab’s way in this extra add on. If we accept the figure of 2.5 mil rides per day as stated by Grab in its website, the additional daily income is RM750,000 - the monthly extra income is RM22.5 mil!!

This is a similar business model used by Air Asia in the past. They got fined for this in Australia some years ago. Grab now sees this strategy as a blue ocean until its closed off.

This action lacks transparency and fairness to the customer, who they claim to serve. It will take public dissatisfaction and complaints to change this.

As the old adage goes, buyers beware. Corporations will do what they can get away with until they are told or forced to do otherwise. Corporations will do what they think is legal, not necessarily ethical towards their customers.

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