How to pay the lowest price when booking a taxi for your vacation(4 min read)

We all want to pay the lowest price for the best service, irrespective of what we are buying.

My team at Gozo Cabs has established a massive network of taxi operators and is at this point the largest taxi services provider for travel to and from anywhere in India. In the past few years building this incredible team we have learnt a thing or two about working closely with taxi operators and customer helping them both to get the best out of their transaction with each other.

Gozo is an intermediary and through this note you can better understand our tech and the problem we are solving.

Let’s first understand the taxi market on India … (That’s a seperate post that I’ll come back to soon)

Next let’s understand the operators mindset (more on this later too)

Now let’s understand the customers expectations (more on this soon)

Finally, here are the tips that will help you save money and get the best possible service when you travel (we’re talking intercity travel not commuting within your city. Our friends at Uber and Ola have that covered quite well) by taxi.

• Decide what kind of service you want
  • Price and quality are traded off against each other all the time.
• Are you okay with an older car?
  • As the price goes lower, the operator focuses on optimising their cost structure there are many seats they can achieve this – with an older car, one that has greater wear and tear (direct affect on your comfort… Think seats, shock absorbers, how cold the AC runs etc) or use an alternative fuel type
• What about the fuel type?
  • CNG is quite popular in India. Electric cars are newer so that not exactly a cheaper option at the moment. At the time of this writing Diesel fuel has topped ₹100 a liter
  • There are fuel pumps all over the place and are easily accessible. CNG stations are a different story… These are fewer and far between. You could be spending and extra hour sometimes taking a detour to find a CNG pump and if you’re not so lucky, the wait time at the fuel pump can top up to an hour somtimes.
• What about luggage space?
  • Cars fuelled with CNG have very limited luggage space.
  • In addition take into account the number of travellers. More the people, lesser the luggage you can carry. Not all cars are equipped with roof top luggage carriers (so request one of you need one)
• How we do this at Gozo?
  • Gozo tiers it’s service offering – the value tier leans more towards price and attempts to make a best effort on service quality. Our value+ tier attempts on a balance between quality and price. The select tier puts quality first. Ultimately, you get what you pay for.
• How do I get the best price?
  • There is always a fixed inventory of vehicles available in any given town or city
  • The nicer vehicles are in great demand and tend to sell out sooner. (everyone wants good service. The early bird catches the prize)
  • And if you have specific preferences, it’s best to relay them to your provider as early as you know about them.
  • The best prices are typically available a week to 10 days ahead of your date of travel.
  • And if your date of travel aligns with a major holiday or a holiday season then try to book even earlier if possible
  • Another factor that matters a lot and seems to be the most neglected by travellers is your source and destination towns of travel. Smaller towns have lesser inventory and the risk of inventory sellout is higher.
  • Now if you are traveling with a provider like Gozo (we pioneered one way intercity travel in India and continue to be the leader in getting you the best prices for one way travel), you need to also consider your one way travel requirements. We can provide you heavily discounted one way prices between towns that have a lot kg of up and down traffic however our one way prices tend to be higher if the likelihood of the can operator getting a return trip is far reduced.

At Gozo, we’re constantly impacting and building phenomenal technology to make available cabs for intercity travel. We do not own a single cab however we have a duty and we look out for the best interests of not just or customers but also our taxi operators. Did you know, almost 75% of the Gozo fleet is owned and run by individual taxi operators. These operators had to previously depend on a variety of travel agencies for business howwve they now receive regular business through our platform. Through the Gozo platform we have enabled a regular income for over 2 Lac households across India.

So the next time you travel intercity please know you aren’t just traveling in a cab you are also moving the Indian economy forward.