Woman who's overseas gets cab booking alerts from S'pore
The New Paper*|*Fri, Mar 20, 2015
In four minutes, Singaporean Jolene Siow received five alerts from taxi operator ComfortDelGro's booking application on her phone yesterday.
Three of them said there were no taxis available, while another two informed her that a taxi would be arriving at her doorstep.
The problem? Miss Siow, who is in her 20s, is in Japan and did not use the app.
Worried that two taxis would make wasted trips, she immediately loaded the application, only to find the bookings page empty.
"I'm not in Singapore now, so (I) would not have tried to book a cab," Miss Siow told The New Paper.
IT consultant Abhijeet Gandhi , 31, told TNP that he faced the same problem yesterday.
Concerned
It was the first time this has happened, and he is concerned that there could be some issues with the app.
"I don't think the bookings went through, so thankfully no taxi driver was waiting for me," said Mr Abhijeet, who uses the app at least once a week.
"I was worried that I'd start getting calls while I'm at work and busy. I also didn't want the cabbies to unnecessarily make the trip and be disappointed," he added.
Other ComfortDelGro app users who were affected similarly included nonprofit organisation Gyanada's founder Adrianna Tan, who is in Jakarta.
TNP understands that some of these bookings reached the cabbies, but were cancelled before they made the trips.
A cabby who wanted to be known only as Richard claimed he started getting the phantom bookings about a week ago. \
His taxi was one of the two that Miss Siow had "booked" yesterday.
"The booking appeared, but when I tried to click on the button that tells how long it will take to reach the destination, the booking was automatically cancelled," he recounted.
Another cabby, who wanted to be known only as Mr Wee, however, said he did not have such a problem.
His was the other cab which was supposedly booked by Miss Siow.
ComfortDelGro's Group Corporate Communications Officer Tammy Tan said there was a technical glitch on the taxi booking app's push notification feature at 2.30pm yesterday.
She said: "As a result, some app users received notifications of past taxi bookings.
The software malfunction was rectified within half-an-hour.
"We would like to extend our deepest apologies to all app users who were affected by the software glitch."
It is not known how many taxi app users were affected
