EV ride-hailing company BluSmart, on Monday, notified its users that it is introducing a new pricing structure on the platform, which includes surge pricing, effectively immediately.
This comes after the founders of the Gurugram-based startup promised to provide zero cancellations and zero surge pricing, unlike its ride-hailing counterparts.
The new pricing structure has two time slots — Rush hours and Relaxed hours. Rush hours is further split into two — Rush hour for city rides and rush hour for airport rides. The rush hour for city rides is between 8:30 am to 10:30 am and then again from 5:30 pm to 8:00 pm on weekdays. Whereas airport rush hours are 3:30 am to 6:30 am and 9:00 pm to 1:00 am, applicable all days of the week.
In the notification,
BluSmart said, “During these specified rush hours, you’ll notice a slight increase in fares as there is increased traffic that might lead to longer trip durations.”
It also said that all other hours will be relaxed hours when fares will remain at regular or reduced rates.
Users took to X (formerly Twitter) to point out the u-turn in the stance taken by the company, as no surge price was the primary differentiator that defined the mobility startup and differentiated it from the likes of Ola and Uber.
An old post on X from BluSmart co-founder,
Anmol Singh Jaggi has also resurfaced, where he promised zero surges in pricing.
Jaggi also responded to CNBC-TV18's Ritu Singh's post on X about the update saying, "Surge price is unpredictable, our pricing is just a true and transparent reflection of effort by driver partners during rush hours. Surge is non-transparent & arbitrary, what @BluSmartIndia has done is to make it clear & upfront on what the pricing would be."
In November, Punit Goyal, co-founder and Chief of Fundraising at BluSmart in a conversation with
CNBC-TV18 explained surge pricing and how they plan to take on Uber and Ola. He said, “A challenge that we got to know from the consumer was surge pricing. Since it's an app platform, the job of Uber is to show drivers where the demand is and show customers where the cars are right this matchmaking is what
Uber does, and for that, it charges a commission. But to do that it does heat mapping it knows where the demand is. So a lot of surge happens if they see the car is not there, they increase the price in that region so that more and more drivers can come to that area. But that is wrong.
“The pricing goes over the roof sometimes you end up paying you know like ₹40 to ₹50 a kilometer for a ride which was meant to be ₹18 or ₹20 a kilometer. So, we thought if we launched industry-first features of zero ride denials and zero surge pricing, that would be absolutely game changing, right. Nobody has done that globally. We launched with this idea,” he further explained.
