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BUMPY START FOR CAIRO'S YELLOW CABS
BY AMENA BAKR
The ambitious Cairo Capital Taxi project received rave reviews from the press when it was introduced in March, but it seems that the brand new fleets of gleaming yellow cabs have already hit their first pothole. Recent complaints from customers have questioned the competency of the program’s management.
Two companies, Cairo Radio Cab & Limousine (Cairo Cab) and Instant Car Rentals (City Cab), made their debut on the capital’s streets in mid-March. The third participating company delayed its operations by about a month until its call center was operational, thereby allowing customers to place pickup orders via a hotline. “We knew that a lot of people wanted to use the hotline so we [wanted to offer] them what they wanted,” says Khaled Mostafa Younis, CEO of International Cairo Taxi (ICT).
In theory, offering customers what they want should score a few points for the business, but Nagui Yassa, CEO of Cairo Cab, argues that ICT’s management made a huge mistake by advertising its hotline prematurely. “In order to be ready you have to have a very well prepared call center, and you have to have proper dispatching and ‘A-one’ communication. Unfortunately, they lack these three things,” he told Business Monthly.
Yassa claims that most of the current complaints his company receives are from people who think that the Capital Taxi project is handled by one company. “Most of the complaints we get come from the company that is currently operating with the short number 19155, as people still don’t know the difference between the [three] companies,” he says.
Demand on the new service is high and with each company having only 50 cabs in operation, Yassa says demand far outstrips supply. Although both Cairo Cab and City Cab have hotlines, they have decided not to reveal the numbers until the second phase of the Cairo Capital Taxi project, when each company will augment its fleet by 150-200 cabs. “We already have a lot of pressure from too many orders,” he says. “Imagine the amount of chaos there would be if we operate the hotline at this stage.”
Currently Cairo Cab and City Cab still rely on designated pickup points. Pickups are arranged informally through the two companies’ landlines and drivers’ mobiles.
Since the start of the project, the three companies have held periodic meetings to discuss how the market is responding to the services and how to further improve. “At the end of the day, we can’t force anyone from doing anything they want, including the advertising of the hotline,” says Mohamed Al-Hawary, public relations manager of City Cab.
Customer complaints over the last period generally fell into two categories; either cabs were unavailable or pickup was unreliable. “I have very little trust in those yellow cabs because one of them came late for an appointment I had,” complained Ahmed Omran, a 36-year-old engineer. Yassa insists ICT’s early release of the hotline is largely responsible for the current level of customer dissatisfaction and has negatively impacted the reputation of the other two companies. “But in time, people will come to realize the difference between the [three] companies and make their choices accordingly,” he says.
Younis, however, defends the idea of advertising the hotline and says ICT has improved its communications scheme to minimize late pickups. Its dispatchers now use “push to talk” technology that allows them to call their drivers and know their exact location. “Despite the pressure we have been facing I would say that 70 to 75 percent of the time we make it to the customer on time,” he says.
The company has also created a priority list for destinations it deems on-time arrival most important. “We are giving top priority to people who are going to the airport and people who need the cab for long distances,” he explains. Shorter trips are given lower priority. “Some people just want to show off that they are riding a yellow cab by ordering the cab to cross the other side of the street, so these trips are given less priority.”
One of the biggest setbacks to the Capital Taxi project has been the government’s delay in issuing a license for the three companies to use a Global Positioning System (GPS). According to Younis, tracking the movement of individual taxis and monitoring their meters is very difficult. “By using a GPS it would be much easier to have control over the cars,” he says. “Now, we [are doing this] work manually which is very exhausting and not cost effective.”
The government has expressed concern over potential security threats from the use of GPS technology. Yassa argues that “in Europe they sell these GPS devices on supermarket shelves.” He predicted that officials will soon realize that there is no harm in having these devices in cars. “Some time ago, they [security officials] considered walkie-talkies as very dangerous devices, yet today we all have mobiles... I think that the trend is that we are afraid of anything new, but this will change over time.”
However, General Mahmoud Yassin, vice chairman of the Capital Taxi project, insists the Ministry of Interior is not behind the delay. He points the finger instead at the National Telecommunication Regulatory Authority (NTRA), which has yet to issue a decision on the GPS requests that were submitted in March. “I can’t tell you when the decision will be made but I can assure you that a review of the requests is still under way,” he says.
In the meantime, the companies must manually locate their drivers, which increases the time it takes to respond to orders. Besides improving timing, City Cab’s Al-Hawary says a GPS system would also allow the companies to monitor the driving patterns of their drivers, “We could tell when a driver is speeding or taking the wrong route,” he notes.
In an attempt to provide a faster response time, Cairo Cab experimented with a system of turning on the meter from the time the driver receives the call, instead of upon picking up the customer. “If a customer wants to guarantee a pickup time he must allow me to bring a cab from anywhere and should pay the distance the cab took to reach him,” says Yassa. “I can’t afford to let a car wait two hours before an appointment without working. It’s not economical for us,” he adds.
But this plan quickly backfired when the other companies didn’t follow suit. “It’s just not logical to make the customer pay for a distance they didn’t travel,” says Al-Hawary. “So when the company decided to take this action we had many complaints from customers.”
Yassin agrees, pointing out that Cairo Cab’s metering system has damaged the reputation of the other two companies. “There’s only one company of the three that’s causing all this fuss about the distance it takes to get to the customer and it’s very unfair for them to charge the customer for something he is not responsible for,” he says.
Yassa believes the project’s meter rate is too restrictive. The project’s taxis operate meters that charge a flag fall of £E 3.50, which covers the first kilometer, and £E 1 for every additional kilometer. “One of the huge problems that we are currently facing is that the price of the meter is not enough to keep a good service running,” he complains. “The tariff has to increase because our costs are very high.”
He explained that the drivers in his company receive a salary of about £E 1,000 per month, as well as a 15-percent share of the net profits made during their shift. Younis questions Cairo Cab’s salary scheme. “If they pay that amount to their drivers [it’s] no wonder they’re not making much profits,” he said, while declining to disclose the salary figures of his own drivers.
Yassin strictly refused the idea of increasing the fare. “Right now, the issue of increasing the fare is out of the question,” he says. “It’s just not logical to increase the fare after only two months of operation.” He added that the Traffic Authority is performing spot checks on meters to ensure that the companies don’t tamper with the fare.
Egyptians who have tried the new Capital Taxi cabs generally agree that the fleet of new, clean raincoat-yellow vehicles with working meters is a vast improvement over the hordes of old, often dilapidated black-and-white taxis that cruise Cairo’s streets. But despite promises to provide better services, problems persist. Customers have complained that many drivers are unable to speak English, have no clue about directions and – despite the managing companies’ promises to prevent it – insist on playing music and religious cassettes.
Cairo Cab preempted the latter problem by choosing not to install cassette players in its vehicles, while City Cab and ICT claim their drivers have been trained to ask customers whether they want the music on or off. All three companies, however, insist they have given their drivers brief English language training courses and tested them on the directions for main roads and locations. “We all know that even college graduates don’t know how to speak proper English, so how do people [expect] the drivers to be fluent?” Yassa quips.
A general complaint from all three companies is that they are not permitted to pick up from in front of the arrivals hall at Cairo International Airport. Airport access is a cash cow for traditional black-and-white taxis, who deem arriving travelers and tourists among their best-paying clients. A special license is needed to wait for customers at the terminal, though Yassa claims many taxis sneak in by bribing security officers. “Drivers of black-and-white cabs give officers at the airport a couple of pounds so they can ease past security, but our drivers can’t do that because we are a [legal] company,” he says.
According to Capital Taxi project officials, the airport offered each of the three companies a stop in front of the arrival gates in exchange for £E 150,000 a year, but all three companies refused to pay. “Taxis all over the world don’t have to pay in order to have a stop at the airport, so why should we? It should be the responsibility of the governorate,” argues Yassa, who claims municipal authorities recently agreed to pick up the tab in the belief that the project would create a better image of Egypt for arriving tourists.
Despite a few initial problems, the three companies remain optimistic about the future of the project. “It’s true that the profits we’ve made so far are less than what we expected, but this is still a good starting point,” says Younis.
At the same time, Yassin is keeping his fingers crossed and hopes that this project does not collapse like a previous effort in 2001 to upgrade taxis. The government had planned to give out loans to drivers in order to buy new cars, but the project never materialized. “The project failed because cars at the time were very expensive and drivers had problems selling their old cars,” he says. “Overall, we had only three people take advantage of these loans.”
Yassin expects the Capital Taxi project to be more successful because private companies have more capital than individuals, and generally better success in private-public partnerships. He declined to comment on what would become of traditional taxis if the Capital Taxi projects catches on. “We have a few ideas about how to deal with the black-and-white cabs, but now is not the right time to reveal them,” he says.
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