I made a pleasant discovery during my first two weeks here in Singapore about cab rides. You can actually ride cabs for free every now and then!
Singapore has several major taxi companies. Their vehicles can be identified by the colour of their livery. The major ones are Comfort Taxi (Blue), CityCab (Yellow), SMRT Taxis (Brown), TransCab (Red), and Premier Taxis (Silver). I’ve had a good experience with all of them. Premier remains my favourite – they’re a bit more expensive than the rest, and tend to have nicer and better maintained cars. Cabs here are so well run, that Uber has almost no impact here.
Enter the disruptor… Grab Taxi, or Grab as it is now known.
They’ve got a similar concept to Uber where private vehicles driven by their owners can be hailed using a taxi hailing app, and will take you from one part of town to the other.
The difference is that the Grab App can be used to hail both Grab cars (which are driven by owners of private vehicles), and standard taxis as well as a range of different premium options from Grab.
This is where it gets better. Occasionally, Grab runs promotions where they give away rides that start and end within the Central Business District between 6:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. for free! (The caveat is that you need to use Grab pay where you provide the app with your credit card details).
This was a handy bonus for me during my first two weeks in Singapore. They ran the promotion for the first two weeks of April. Every morning, I would hail a Grab car at around 6:45 a.m. and would be at work by 7:00 a.m. in the air-conditioned comfort of a vehicle ride that was free! Come 5:00 p.m. in the evening at the end of the day, I would do it all over again. I went for a full two weeks without any commuting costs!
If that wasn’t good enough, among some of the vehicles that I got driven in were an Audi A4, a Volvo S70, and a Jaguar XJ6. Not too shabby for a ride sharing service.
Even if you’re visiting Singapore, I highly recommend that you use the Grab app to catch your rides around town. Click the link above to get $8 off your first ride, or use the referral code debashis75188 when signing up via the Android or iOS app which you can download via the respective App Stores.
