Grab has officially announced its new rewards programme for passengers. GrabRewards allows people to earn points for taking rides, and later exchange them for rewards from Grab partners around the Southeast Asia region.
Earning points is simple enough, all passengers have to do is use Grab’s service. This covers GrabTaxi, GrabCar, and GrabShare. In return, they earn one point for every RM1 spent. Those opting for cash rides will earn five times the normal rewards points; while those using GrabPay receive 10 times more points.
Spending points is based on the level of the Grab user. This span across the Silver, Gold, and Platinum tier users; where the point cost of rewards decreases as they move up the tiers. The tiers are based on accumulated points, with users needing to accumulate 8,000 points to reach Platinum.
Points can be quickly redeemed to get RM5, RM10, or RM15 off the current ride; or saved up to be used later. That said, the redemption value of the GrabRewards points only goes up to 8.8-percent of the total ride cost on Grab.
Other rewards come from GrabRewards partners, like Tesco, Happy Fresh, myBurgerLab, Forever 21, Flower Chimp, Zalora, and dahmakan. GrabRewards’ catalogue of promotions will rotate over time, depending on the existing deals with partners. In all, the company expects to have at least 15 to 20 partners offering rewards at any given time.
Localised and targeted promotions are in the works for a future expansion of the programme. This would involve city specific deals, as well as alerting passengers to deals based on their destination.
Platinum tier users will also be entitled to less tangible benefits from Grab. These are priority bookings during peak hours, a platinum support line for immediate assistance, and early access to any new features from Grab.
Grab is baking the rewards points system directly into the service itself; which is likely to encourage people to actually use it. Which is probably a good way to get more users to buy into the rewards system.
