In this day and age, what could be worse than making a phone call to arrange a taxi? It sounds too much of a hassle, and while it might be effective for many, the concept sounds too medieval. This is just my personal opinion, but gladly some firms are keen at bringing Cab facilitation online. The idea is to help ease the task for arranging taxis via one single destination. Yandex has started doing exactly that.
The Russian online giant is leveraging its popularity online in Russia to launch a Yandex Taxi Search Service. Yandex.Taxi sends request for booking a cab to all taxi services and accelerates the process of finding a cab for travellers. To start off, Yandex.Taxi has succeeded in partnering with 11 Taxi Service providers. Currently this service is just in beta and the operations are limited to Moscow alone.
What Yandex.Taxi does is check on the taxis available with the partners and sends the booking request for a cab that is closest to the client. Upon the confirmation of booking, the clients can keep track of their taxi via the city map to know where exactly is it and estimate the time it will take to reach them.
What this actually does is ensure the client goes through least trouble of making bookings for taxis. Yandex.Taxi can be called a broker that does all the hard work of ensuring the taxi arranged for is the closest and no tie is wasted in waiting for the commute to reach a client. There is a lot of value addition too, given that the clients have the option to opt for the price for the bookings they make, and special requirements like smoking or non-smoking, etc. Of course the tariffs are all the headache of the taxi service provider and each one of them ensures they deliver the requirements requested by the client.
Yandex.Taxi is currently available on the iPhone and the Android devices with a desktop version set to be released soon.
