Factors Influencing Passengers’ use of E-Hailing Services in Malaysia

Abstract

The landscape of transportation services has changed for the better since the introduction of e-hailing companies. In general, e-hailing applications on smartphones can assist users in performing the following tasks; 1) locate taxis available; 2) allow drivers to identify passengers who require taxi services; 3) book a taxi; 4) allow drivers to receive taxi bookings; and 5) make payment online. It is easy to install e-hailing applications on any type of mobile device. Nevertheless, it is crucial to assess the efficiency of e-hailing applications as they are still new to the market. The efficiency of the system can be evaluated through the factor that contributed to the adoption of e-hailing. Thus, this study aims to investigate the factors that influence the passengers’ towards the use of e-hailing services. The independent variables of this research are trustable, comfort, promotion and coupon redemption and fare; and the dependent variable is the passengers’ perception. A survey was conducted among e-hailing users in Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia. With the use of a survey questionnaire, 107 targeted respondents provided valuable feedback. The surveys were carried out by boarding e-hailing passengers’ on working days. Therefore, the respondent population corresponds to all types of e-hailing passengers’ in the city. The survey consisted of two parts; the first part contains general questions about gender, age, ethnic, employment, gender and frequency of usage. The second part is the major part of the questionnaire which consists of travel attributes. In previous literature, most relevant studies show that factor that influences the passengers to use the e-hailing services were found to be trustable, comfort, promotion and coupon redemption and fare. Therefore, the questionnaire has been built according to those significant factors. The correlation analysis was used to identify the relationship between independent variables and dependent variable. Through the results obtained, the linear regression shows that the trustable, comfort, promotion, and coupon redemption and fare provided a positive significant association with the factor that influences the passengers’. Among the variables studied, comfort shows the most significant factor in passengers’ satisfaction towards e-hailing services in Malaysia with Cronbach’s Alpha of 0.892. In conclusion, this study shows some important information and provide benefits particularly to e-hailing services company to be more competitive in this industry by understanding the needs and concerns of passengers’ when they adopt the e-hailing services.