Grab: rival’s accusations ‘untrue, malicious’

Grab Philippines has denied the “phantom booking” accusation made by ride-hailing newcomer Micab, even threatening to sue for libel if the latter insists on its claims.

Grab country head Brian Cu said in a statement on Friday night that the claim made by Micab chief executive officer and cofounder Eddie Ybañez seemed to have “malicious intent.”

Earlier, Ybañez published an online op-ed piece which blamed Grab for the “firestorm of phantom bookings” Micab received in the past few weeks.

Double this month

Ybañez later told the Inquirer that Micab drivers received over 29,000 phantom bookings this month, nearly double from 15,000 in June.

Under the scheme, rides were booked but later cancelled. Most of these bookings were then followed by a call recruiting the Micab driver to switch to Grab, Ybañez added.

The phantom bookings, he told the Inquirer, suddenly stopped on Friday, July 27.

According to Cu, after an internal investigation, “[we] can confirm that Eddie [Ybañez’s] allegations are untrue and [appear] to have malicious intent.”

Cu said Grab would be transparent with the results of its investigation but did not say when these would be released.

“Grab did the responsible thing in taking the time to investigate, and we encourage Eddie [Ybañez] to be similarly responsible in his speech and actions,” he added.

Micab, one of the few transport network company (TNC) applicants accredited in April, was supposed to give consumers a choice, especially after Grab became a monopoly through a regional takeover of rival Uber.

Micab, however, said it had been mired by phantom bookings lately, which made drivers less willing to accept ride requests.

This resulted in a “significant drop” in their acceptance rate, Ybañez said, from a level of 40 percent since June.

Micab first recognized these phantom bookings by looking into passenger accounts that had canceled at least three times in short intervals.

Ybañez said the company recently used an algorithm automatically banning phantom bookings.

Similar case in Singapore

Grab Singapore was also linked to a similar case of phantom bookings which affected its rival, ride-hailing firm Ryde Technologies, said Ybañez who went to Singapore last week to get inputs from Ryde.

The difference, he noted, was that Ryde was able to address the issue immediately because of Singapore’s strict regulation of SIM cards which was not the case in the Philippines.

Micab has currently around 7,000 drivers on its platform, with 3,000 of them based in Manila.

Ybañez said that since the phantom bookings had disappeared, he would no longer comment as “the goal was…for the issue to stop as it was affecting [our] drivers.”

He could not say whether the targeted drivers did indeed move to Grab although he stressed that Micab was actively doing “its best to scale up.” —WITH A REPORT FROM KRIXIA SUBINGSUBING