Those who take Grab regularly will know that you will be charged extra when the ride-hail goes under an Electronic Road Pricing (ERP) gantry.
While most passengers will accept the charges without complaint, more than 40,000 were actually overcharged for their trips.
This was due to inaccurate ERP information applied.
Source: GRAB CAR registration on Facebook. Photo for illustration purposes only.
Those affected have been refunded.
In a joint statement on Friday (22 Dec) quoted by Channel NewsAsia (CNA), the Land Transport Authority (LTA) and the Public Transport Council (PTC) said feedback was received over the overcharging of some Grab passengers.
This affected a total of 60,787 trips from 20 Nov to 4 Dec.
On 20 Nov, ERP rates were reduced by S$1 at certain gantries due to the school holiday period.
The error was due to inaccurate ERP charges, LTA found.
Specifically, outdated ERP rates — i.e. before the reductions — were applied to the final fares of the affected trips.
This resulted in 40,431 passengers being overcharged.
The excess fares ranged from S$1 to S$3 for the large majority, LTA and PTC said.
LTA has directed Grab to trawl through their data so that they can identify other wrongly charged trips.
They are also to take corrective measures.
It is understood that Grab has since “taken action to reimburse all affected passengers”, the statement said.
They have also updated the current ERP charges in their system.
Grab has apologised to customers, explaining to CNA that the error was caused by a “temporary backend syncing issue”.
This prevented an automated feature from updating the ERP rates into their system.
The resulting overcharging affected “a very small percentage” of rides, they said.
The error has since been fixed and the customers refunded.
Moving forward, the company has implemented extra internal testing on top of their existing processes so that to similar incidents won’t happen again.
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Featured image adapted from GRAB CAR registration on Facebook and MS News. Photo on left for illustration purposes only.
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