A field trip to Grab Super App’s travel and food delivery payment service. A cashless experience in Kuala Lumpur.

• Food is delivered on time and the package quality is good. There are many food and beverage options in the app, covering different types of cuisines. However, many restaurant menus have limited pictures of the food and restaurant environment, which sometimes makes it difficult for users to make the best decision with enough information.

• Navigation is not supported in the app, which may be a very important feature missing. If the user wants to dine in at a restaurant, he must manually enter the restaurant name (cannot copy) into Google Maps and navigate.

• Whether on the street or in restaurants, the green figures of Grab delivery boys can be seen everywhere, and they occupy the vast majority of the proportion (65% on paper). The pink figures of Foodpanda, which ranks second on paper (about 30%), are very rare.

• Supermarket convenience delivery takes nearly 1 hour to deliver (and the nearest store is only a 10-minute drive away). If the user lives in the city, supermarket convenience does not seem to be very necessary, considering that the products in the app are not cheaper than those in nearby physical supermarkets. A key reason for such long delivery times and not very affordable prices may be that there is only one supermarket to choose from in Grab, Jaya Grocer, which was acquired by Grab in 2022. This limitation also leads to insufficient selection of certain products.

• The overall user experience is good. It can be rated 7 points, and 10 points is for Meituan’s experience.

Payments

• GrabPay is very well known among merchants and is accepted by almost all merchants, from barbershops and printing shops to restaurants and convenience stores. You can easily see signs accepting GrabPay, except for some more remote merchants or individual street vendors (such as beverage shops in Batu Caves or pop-up stores in shopping malls). The picture below is a typical sign that can be seen in most convenience stores, but from the overall merchant perspective, the most accepted apps are Touch n’ Go, GrabPay and AliPay.

• Some restaurant owners seem to have a higher trust in Touch n’ Go (TNG) and regard it as a government-backed e-wallet (partly owned by CIMB) rather than an “unofficial background” app like Grab. In fact, Grab, Touch n’ Go and Boost are the three e-wallet apps officially approved by the Malaysian government to support its “electronic payment plan” (e-Tunai Rakyat). Of the three apps, Grab is the most tourist-friendly (and supports WeChat and Alipay mini-programs), while TNG requires registration via a local mobile number and Boost requires switching to the iOS App Store to Malaysia.

• ​​Features like transfers between users, buy now, pay later, bill payments, SIM top-ups, points rewards, and travel and ride insurance are all very easy to find and use within the app.

• Cash transactions can still be seen in many places, but mainly from older generations of residents or tourists.

• The overall user experience is very good. A 9 out of 10 would be the Alipay/WeChat payment experience.

Getting Around

• Grab rides usually take 10-15 minutes to arrive. Although the app shows that there are many available drivers nearby, the app usually says "not many drivers now" as shown in the lock screen real-time notification below. However, from the ride experience, the drivers are friendly and the car is clean inside and outside.

• Driver incentives have dropped significantly after the epidemic, from a few ringgits (up to 10 ringgit during peak hours) to less than 1 ringgit per trip. This has dampened drivers' enthusiasm for work to a certain extent, making some drivers unwilling to accept more trips or work longer hours.

• Grab will force drivers to accept or reject new trips by pushing new trip notifications that occupy the full screen. If the driver ignores the trip notification, the real-time navigation will not be able to continue. If rejected, the driver will lose points, and when the driver loses a certain number of points, Grab will reduce his trip allocation priority and may terminate its cooperation with him at any time without any task explanation.

• In contrast, Malaysia's second largest travel service AirAsia adopts a trip bidding mechanism, which is different from Grab's trip allocation mechanism. But because it is sometimes difficult to win the ideal trip, AirAsia's mechanism does not seem to be popular with some drivers. Many drivers work on multiple platforms to maximize the benefits from incentives.

• In the city center and surrounding areas, tourists account for more than 1/3 of the total number of passengers, and there will be more during holidays. Compared with 2023, tourism has recovered slightly, which has increased drivers' income to a certain extent.

• In general, users can easily see Grab's payment or waiting point signs at key hubs such as airports or attractions near the city.

• Grab has bus and ferry booking features, but these did not work properly during the entire trip.

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