MANILA, Philippines – There are finally more options when it comes to booking a ride now that international ride-hailing app inDrive officially resumed operations in the Philippines.

Currently, inDrive allows passengers to book four-seater vehicles in six different areas of the Philippines – Metro Manila, Bacolod, Baguio, Iloilo, Butuan, and Cagayan de Oro.

The app allows passengers to choose their drivers and vice versa. Before booking, passengers are presented with a list of drivers, their respective rating, car model, and history on the road. Drivers, on the other hand, can check the profiles and desired routes of their passengers before accepting a booking.

inDrive positions itself as offering “more affordable” ride-hailing services. Passengers used to be able to negotiate fares with drivers, but that feature has since been removed. It now uses a base fare of P45, a fare per kilometer of P15, a fare per minute of P2, and a surge price.

“Surge price is a crucial part of the pricing system because demand and supply is changing during the day. For example, at nighttime, we have an absence of orders. That’s why prices could be lower, but in peak hours, we will [have] higher demand, and of course the prices will go high,” Afanasii Petrov, inDrive’s business development manager for Southeast Asia, told reporters on Friday, June 28.

However, inDrive maintains that its fares remain cheaper than its competitors, an edge that it must keep as it attempts to grow in a market long dominated by Grab. So far, inDrive only has a “few thousand” drivers in the Philippines, although Petrov previously told Rappler that they had about 4,000 drivers in May. The company is aiming to secure at least 10,000 slots from the Land Transportation Franchising and Regulatory Board (LTFRB) for its driver-operators.

inDrive’s return to the roads comes after it received the go-signal from the LTFRB at the end of May. But prior to that, the newcomer to the ride-hailing industry had a rocky relationship with the agency.

In January 2023, the LTFRB flagged inDrive and Maxim for offering ride-hailing services in the Philippines without any accreditation. Later in December, inDrive received accreditation from the LTFRB and announced that it was preparing to officially launch in the Philippines in 2024.

But before inDrive was able to officially launch, in January 2024, the LTFRB suspended the ride-hailing service due to complaints that its fare-haggling system violated the agency’s established fare matrix. Grab, which is by far the largest ride-hailing company in the Philippines, was among the complainants in the case. The LTFRB only lifted the cease-and-desist order on inDrive on June 4, 2024. – Rappler.com