Ride-hailing major Ola decides to pull the plug on shuttle services

After more than 28 months of operations, Ola is finally shutting down its shuttle services across the country. Over the past few weeks, the company had halted shuttle movement on several routes in Delhi (NCR), Mumbai, Hyderabad, and Kolkata.

With shuttle services, the Tencent-backed company has been trying to become an end to end transportation option for users. Many corporates, startup as well as individuals have been using bus service offered by Ola, ZipGo, and Shuttl for daily office commute.

Ola has reportedly been communicating with users and bus operators for about two weeks regarding termination for service, reports VCCircle. Besides cab service, the company lets users hail bike taxis, autorickshaw, bicycles and order foods (after foodpanda acquisition).

Also read:  Why ride-hailing company Ola fell for beleaguered Foodpanda

The shutdown of shuttle services will certainly give a sense of relief to Sequoia-backed Shuttl and Bengaluru-based ZipGo. Ola used to play the power of deep pocket by indulging in steep discounts to woo shuttle users.

On local turf, Ola has fiercely been competing with Uber. Since past four years, both have been at loggerheads. The duo made several seed-funded bike taxis to bow down and strangulate operations because they indulged in exorbitant discounting (to customers) as well as incentive (to drivers).

Currently, Ola claims 12.5 crore registered users in India including a million driver partners over 110 cities.

The on-demand transportation major had reportedly invested Rs 120-150 crore to launch shuttle services. It also acquired Bengaluru-based Geotagg to strengthen its bus service.

Foreseeing massive potential for the ride-sharing globally, Ola had recently announced overseas debut with operations in Australia. It’s likely to kick-off operations in New Zealand, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bangladesh too.

Ola shuttle competes with Shuttl, ZipGo and Mumbai-based Cityflo. The Gurugram-based Shuttl had reportedly scaled to 10 per cent of the total size of DTC fleet in the past two years. The platform claims to employ 450 buses plying on about 75 routes in NCR.