As Bolt and inDrive drivers continue to protest low fares and high commissions on both platforms, LagRide, which offers significantly higher fares, says it won’t open its platform to drivers from those platforms to earn.
In a chat with Technext, the company’s Director of Communications, Ifeanyi Abraham, said the reason for this is that those drivers are yet to undergo the rigorous training, across various areas, required to operate on its platform. These trainings, ranging from hospitality to behavioural, are what equip ordinary drivers with professionalism that qualifies them to become LagRide captains.
“We are not opening our app for Lagos drivers to earn. We can’t, unfortunately, because of the standard. If you understand the LagRide ecosystem, we believe that until a driver passes through our academy to become a captain, they are not fit for Lagos roads. That is the entire premise of LagRide to start with. The Hospitality training, the Cost Management training, and the Behavioural Psychology training that drivers go through in our academy are what empower them and prepare them for the roads,” Ifeanyi said.
E-hailing drivers in Lagos are currently protesting against hardship occasioned by what they describe as ridiculously low fares on both the Bolt and inDrive apps. This reality is made even harsher considering the ever-increasing cost of operations. Fuel currently sells for roughly N1,400 per litre, data costs have increased by 50 per cent, and spare parts prices continue to soar due to an unstable currency, import tariffs, and other economic factors.
Despite rising operating costs, fares keep falling across both apps, prompting drivers to adopt several means of increasing their revenue, such as negotiating external fees, cancelling trips on the app while completing the same trips offline to avoid paying commissions, etc.
LagRide professionalism
One of the solutions proposed by many drivers is for them to move en masse out of the Bolt and inDrive apps and onto other platforms. One of the platforms touted is the Lagos government-backed platform, LagRide. Indeed, a quick check shows that LagRide offers way higher fares than both apps, in some cases as much as double the fares.
This prompted the question of whether it would make good business sense at this time for the company to open up its app to these other drivers. But the company said the difference in class and quality is just too wide for such an admittance to be considered.
“If you notice the quality of LagRide captains, they are different from most of these other platforms because of this. And they have an ownership mindset from the scratch; they know that once they complete those 90 days, they are going to own their brand-new cars. So this is what is driving them. So we are not opening the LagRide platform to any externals,” the company’s spokesperson said.
In a previous chat, the LagRide spokesperson noted that there is more than enough demand on its platform, as the company’s marketing team spends millions of naira every month generating rider demand, and at present, Captains are not meeting that demand. He also said the company is actively working to increase that capacity to ensure that any Captain operating within its ecosystem has more than enough work without looking elsewhere.
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