GoTransit: Unifying Our Mobility Products With Public Transportation
Here's how we integrated our offerings with public transportation to make multi-modal trips effortless.
By Shobhit Singhal
As Southeast Asia’s leading on-demand mobile platform, Gojek provides access to a wide range of services used by millions of people everyday. Founded with a mission to help remove life’s daily frictions and ease commuter woes on Jakarta’s congested roads, transport remains at the heart of Gojek’s offering through GoRide, GoCar, and more.
What makes us incredibly proud of our mobility services is the fact that they don’t operate in isolation. Commuters use these services alongside various other modes of transportation—public transport being the most common. This is especially true in Indonesia, where multi-modal trips are part of many people’s daily commutes. In the Greater Jakarta area alone, approximately half of our users have previously taken a Gojek trip to a public transportation hub to continue their journey.
In fact, connecting to public transport services is so popular that the top 11 most frequently booked destinations for users around Jakarta are all public transportation hubs. This continues to be one of the fastest growing use cases, increasing 46% year-on-year.
Introducing GoTransit
Creating the best experience for our users has always been at the heart of what we do at Gojek, and this extends to improving our users’ daily commute and enabling them to connect to public transport with greater ease.
And thus, GoTransit was born. It’s a personal trip assistant that makes multimodal trips more convenient by recommending routes that integrate public transportation, with GoRide and GoCar serving as the first or last mile. Commuters are able to see the best routes in their entirety, compare prices of different transportation modes, and estimate their travel time a as well.
Our vision for GoTransit is to eventually enable it to guide users through each step of the transport journey. This means that GoTransit will be able to remind you when it’s time to get off at a station, or tell you exactly which exit to take. In the future, we will also make it possible for users to purchase an end-to-end trip in one “bundle”, including tickets for the train or bus.
By doing this, we hope to reduce friction for our users when taking multi-modal trips, improving the overall customer experience and increasing public transport ridership, which has significant benefits for the society — further easing traffic congestion and reducing emissions produced by private vehicles.
Integrating GoTransit with KRL
With all of this in mind, we set out this year to integrate GoTransit with KRL, a commuter rail system in Greater Jakarta, through a collaboration with PT Kereta Commuter Indonesia (PT KCI).
With this integration in place, users are now able to use the Gojek app to plan their routes and purchase KRL tickets via cashless payment methods. Tickets can be purchased for up to 10 people in one transaction, enabling greater convenience for those traveling in groups, and QR code tickets are generated instantly upon payment, making the entire process simple and seamless.
Only six months after the initial integration, the results have surpassed all expectations. GoTransit usage increased 20x within the first month of the integration and Gojek has also become the leading digital app in selling KCI tickets.
We’re also heartened to see that GoTransit is enabling more people to adopt digital payment methods. Since the introduction of KRL tickets on GoTransit, there has been a 3x increase in KCI customers moving from card or cash to digital payments — a very encouraging trend.
The road ahead for GoTransit
While we are delighted about GoTransit’s success so far, this is just the beginning. We are working on deepening the integration, so that in the future, users can make an end-to-end trip booking at one go, covering the first, middle and last mile. This will ease user pain points by reducing challenges associated with multi-modal transportation, and increasing user convenience.
By enabling our users to plan a multi-modal trip seamlessly, we firmly believe that this will improve their experience on public transportation and encourage more people to make public transportation a part of their commutes. Stay tuned for more updates from GoTransit!
If you’re wondering how we deep-dived into the experiences of our users with public transport and the research that went into building GoTransit, here’s a blog you’ll love.
Keen to know what goes behind the scenes of building Gojek? Check out our blogs here.