Aloxeom: Taking Vietnam’s Streetside Motorbike Taxis to the Next Level

Earlier this month I wrote about Tappxi, the Android app that makes taking a taxi in Vietnam safer and easier. This week, let’s look at Aloxeom. It’s a web-based service that connects passengers with motorbike taxi drivers for a ride in Hanoi, Vietnam. “Alo” means hello, and “xe om” are the Vietnamese words for motorbike taxi (literally meaning hugging vehicle).

So the service is like this, if I step out of my house and I need a ride to the supermarket, but I don’t want to take an expensive taxi, I can call the operator or via the website at Aloxeom and they’ll send the nearest motorbike taxi guy straight to me. Such motorbike taxis in Vietnam are everywhere, and they’re on most of the street corners of the main streets of Vietnam.

The problem with getting a moto-driver is that sometimes, when you’re off the main streets, it’s harder to find them and it’s always a hassle to haggle on the price. You never know how much it costs to get to the next district or five kilometers away. Thus Aloxeom solves this in two ways: the service has over 800 motorbike drivers in their database. All of the drivers are mapped out on their system along with their phone number, so if you tell the Aloxeom operator where you are, the Aloxeom database will send the closes moto-driver.

The cool thing about the service is that Aloxeom doesn’t actually employ the drivers, it’s an add-on service that allows drivers who already have their own personal business to tap into another network and avenue for revenue. But Aloxeom also guarantees quality and reliability. It’s sort of like the taxi-booking apps we’ve seen spring up around the world.

Aloxeom’s own people have interviewed every one of the 1,000 drivers that applied to the service and after a few months they had to remove a few from the system to keep the quality high. Aloxeom makes sure that every ride is VND 6,000 ($.30) per kilometer and sends an SMS to the driver and the passenger to confirm the right pay. Aloxeom takes 15 percent of the cut for every ride.

I talked to founder and CEO of Aloxeom, May Huy Mao, who told me that:

In the past, there have been companies that have tried to enter this space by putting GPS machines on the motorbikes or other extra services, but they didn’t gain much traction. We’re focused quite simply on making it easier to catch a motorbike taxi and calculating the cost without being taken advantage of.

The team of five has only been working on this project since early March and is looking to grow it into Ho Chi Minh city and Danang by the end of the year. I’m excited, and I’ll certainly use it the next time I’m up in the capital.

We’ve also written about a similar startup in Indonesia, called Go-Jek.