Meru Cabs Online Booking Website - A Review

I'm a big fan of Meru Cabs. Always on time [1], well maintained fleets of cars, and appropriately priced.

My only grouse had been with waiting (for eternity) to speak with someone in their call center to make a booking. Well, with the recent launch of online bookings on the Meru Cabs website, even that seems to have been solved.

A big shoutout to my friends at DotAhead, Goa for solving this beautifully.

What's good

The home page is where all the action happens - as it ideally should, for a website focusing on transactions. No mugshots of founders & investors welcoming you to the "Meru family". No corporate-speak about our "fleet of cars", "since 2002", yada yada. Get your booking. And get out. Simple. Here's what the home page looks like:



Interestingly, they have used mobile numbers as the primary user identifier instead of a username or email address. A sensible decision given the fact that people would expect cab booking details to be sent on their mobile phone.

Bookings are allowed for up to 24 hours in advance for the four cities that Meru currently operates in - Bangalore, Delhi, Hyderabad, & Mumbai. The form fields to specify the pick-up & drop address are structured & auto-complete driven to help allocate cabs in an automated way. Previously specified addresses are automatically saved in the user's profile. One address can be tagged as "Home" & one address as "Office" for speeding up the booking process for frequently booked routes.



After the booking form on the home page, there's a second screen where you confirm all the booking details and agree to some T&C. And that's it. You're done. Within a few seconds you get an SMS + email, either confirming the booking or notifying you of unavailability.

What can be better

One basic feature that is missing is a persistent login, i.e. "Remember me on this computer". Is it because they don't see too many repeat transactions from the same customer? Hard to believe given the amazing service delivery by Meru cabs and brilliant online booking experience.

The home/office selection tags and the previous location selection drop-down could've been designed better (take a look at the screenshot above). I had made 3-4 bookings before I noticed those tags on the address form. It took even longer for me to realise that "Select a previous location" could be clicked to view a list of all previous locations.

Irrespective of these minor glitches, the Meru Cabs online booking is brilliant. The booking experience is almost friction-less and it actually does live up to it's promise: "Book a cab in less than 60 seconds" I don't remember using their call center to make a booking after I discovered their website.

Update [10-June-2011]: Read my review of Meru Cabs' mobile website.

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[1] Some of my friends have had a bad experience where the cab had arrived later than the scheduled pick-up time. However that kind if service delivery failure can happen in any business. Ensuring that it happens less than 5% of the time is what makes a service delivery phenomenal.