The taxi business in India has been an unorganized market for too many years. Everywhere in the world you go – the travel business is a service oriented business.
- Customers prefer to travel by airlines who provide great experience at the best prices
- Customers prefer to stay at hotels where they get great experience at the best prices
- In general, Customers prefer to use any service where they can get a great experience at the best price
Traveling by taxi is way better than taking the bus or the train. The experience due to the very differences in transport types is better and more convenient with taxi cabs.
Long distance transportation has few choices – Trains, Buses and Taxis
| Trains | Buses | Taxis |
| Shared transport on a fixed schedule | Shared transport on a fixed schedule | Private transport on your preferred schedule |
| Infrastructure is not great. Luxury trains are few. Tickets are hard to get | Sleeper & Luxury buses are available but its still somewhat crowded. Roads are betting better so its a good option | Roads are getting better. Larger & luxury cars make it easier to go longer distances, faster and on your own schedule/itinerary |
Most customers middle or upper middle class customers (a growing portion of India) prefer to take a cab. Sometimes, its cheaper for a family to take a cab vs buying 4 bus or train tickets for the family.
However, When we spoke to over 1000 family and travellers in 2015 we found a shocking truth. Customers were worried about booking a cab. These was no single dependable source to book a cab. You always needed an inside connection, a jugaad or a friend who knew someone reliable and trustworthy. Basically, the overall cab booking & travel experience before 2015 was questionable at best.
Also prices for cab services were sometimes way too high and quite random in many cases. We started studying this market and realized that we can help not just customers but also taxi operator partners through technology. We created Gozo to solve these problems and to make it easy for customers & partners to find each other. Gozo exists so you can book a quality cab at amazing prices anywhere in India.
When we started Gozo, we observed most of the taxi bookings across India were done with travel agents. In most of these cases we observed that the customer paid a hefty fee to the travel agent but little of that money actually made it to the taxi owner/driver. So we adopted a model where any taxi owners can work directly with Gozo and get business continuously as long as they provide good customer service.
Gozo’s penalty system is a way to ensure that partners who provide great customer experience thrive and those who don’t care about customer experience are either encouraged to behave better.
Gozo’s vision is to be the most trusted platform for travel & tourism. We provide customers with quality cabs at best possible prices. We keep our operating costs low so we can also create the highest money making opportunity for our taxi driver partners.
Our role is to match customers with drivers & once the match is made ensure every ride is a great experience and a fair transaction for both customers & drivers.
Deepesh Arora, Co-Founder
For partners our guidelines are simple –
(1) Be on time for pickups (2) Provide great customer service – clean car, polite behavior, be honest with the customer & follow the law (3) Grow your business, make money by abiding to these guidelines.
Our promise to you is – better your services, the more business you will get from the Gozo platform.
Sometimes our partners violate the above guidelines and that causes bad experience for customers, hurts Gozo’s reputation and even hurts other partners who are following guidelines.
Only as a disciplinary measure, we apply penalties to those who violate guidelines. We compensate partners with in Gozo coins when they follow guidelines and get great cusotmer ratings. Good partners make mistake sometimes but they can easily pay for those using the Gozo coins they have earned (does not affect your pocket). But bad behaving partners get penalties and eventually get blocked by our system.
The ultimate goal of penalties is to encourage taxi driver partners to provide great customer experiences. Follow our service guidelines so you can get the best ratings from customers and grow your business. Always remember, travel business is a service-oriented business. Business grows for those whose service is best.
Gozo has teams for customer & vendor advocacy. We realize sometimes customers are not completely right either, so these teams help by listening to the customer & the taxi partner (vendor) and help mediate to a reasonable solution. Taxi partners should remember, Gozens work hard to enable a fair, honest and amazing experience for customers & taxi partners for every ride, every day.
As always we appreciate our partners and our customers and are listening for your feedback and suggestions at all times.