When planning a trip to a different city, the biggest hurdle that comes on way is booking the cab. Relying on the local car vendors might seem sceptical but there are no other options. Back in 2010, it was really hard to find a cost effective and easy to access city and outstation travel options. Taxi was a luxury back then and public transportation options were not much popular. This was quite disturbing and experiences with taxi services were really costly and painful. This didn't go unnoticed by Chitranshu Sharma who later leveraging his personal travel experience zeroed in upon setting up a company to solve this problem. "In 2012, I hired a cab for outstation travel from Delhi to Shimla and it costed me a fortune. Moreover, the overall experience was terrible. Eventually, to address such issues, I started a travel gig for outstation called CallForCabs, a call based taxi booking service and traditional way of booking cabs. I partnered with about three travel agencies in Chandigarh with an average fleet size of 20. I had 50+ vehicles on board and started using Google ad words to generate calls and offering cabs. But the real problem was the cost and meanwhile OLA & Uber were launched. The silver lining was that they didn't have the outstation taxi booking option on board. I renamed my venture as WooCabs and kept offering services using website and phone calls. By 2016, I had over 1000 vehicles on board. Today, we receive over 150 outstation taxi bookings daily and growing,"

enlightens Chitranshu.

WooCabs has established great reputation in the past five years and is one of the most promising transportation options and a successful aggregator. "India is a cost sensitive market and has a huge impact on customer base. So we worked on this keeping market size and demand in mind. We believe we are doing pretty well and positioned as one of the greatest options in the transportation aggregator ecosystem," Chitranshu mentions.

WooCabs has established great reputation in the past five years and is one of the most promising transportation options and a successful aggregator

Carving a Niche
WooCabs offers cab booking services such as On Demand City Taxi, City Car Rental Services, One Way Outstation Taxi Service (Limited Routes), Round Trip Taxi Booking, Multi Day & Multi City Trips, amongst others. Most of the enquiries comes for leisure and business travel. To ensure customers contentment, the team communicates, treats and offers best of its services to its new and returning customers.

The company has a team of six dedicated to WooCabs booking management. This team is the backbone of the day to day operations and handle requests through emails, messages, mobile app, website and phone. Besides, it has three dedicated technical team members who are responsible to update, upgrade and manage all of the mobile, web and backend technology platforms for smoother booking and execution process; three key Account managers and customer service professionals for corporate tie ups with OTAs i.e. MMT, Clear trip, and others.

The Road to Success
WooCabs commenced its operations in Chandigarh in 2014 and after five years, it is now operating in 15 cities in northern region of India. It is currently serving on about 50 major routes with an average ticket size of INR 2500. At present, the company receives over 150 booking requests every day and handling it quite well with 1000+ vendors on platform.

"We are currently expanding our presence in more tier one and tier 2 cities. We are quite slow on this as we want to make our technology platforms more robust as we are in middle of making massive changes in our mobile app platforms which will make it easier for users to book and respond to booking requests," he concludes.