Why ixigo, Rapido and Google Maps are offering Metro ticketing services despite low profits?

In a digital-first world, the battle is for your eyeballs. Your attention. Or, to use the correct terminology of the digital merchants, your ‘engagement’.

As artificial intelligence (AI) upends the algorithm of the existing ecosystem of data-driven internet usage, internet companies are stepping up their game to get their users not just hooked, but ‘hook, line and sinker’.

The new strategy is, 'why do one thing, when you can do it all?' To put it in business terms, offer more for your customer so that he stays on and uses your app more and more.

That explains the surge in the number of apps onboarding Metro ticketing in general, and Delhi Metro ticketing in particular. Since the country’s largest metro service was onboarded by the government-authorised commerce platform ONDC, there have been more than 11 mobile platforms that have onboarded Metro ticketing as part of their service offerings.

The latest, Friday afternoon, is ixigo, the online travel aggregator. The Gurugram-based startup announced the launch of metro tickets on its two apps, which till now catered to long-distance train bookings (an area in which it is the market leader if you rule out state-run IRCTC) as well as buses and flights.

Dinesh Kumar Kotha, CEO of ixigo Trains & Confirmtkt, said, “With millions of Indians already using ixigo daily for their inter-city journeys on trains, buses and flights, this integration with Delhi’s public transport lifeline will allow commuters and travellers a more seamless last-mile journey experience. Delhi Metro is the backbone of daily commute in Delhi-NCR, and enabling instant ticket bookings directly within our app will help passengers save time, avoid long queues, and plan their end-to-end journeys on ixigo.”

Not to mention, the fact that it could keep its 54 crore annual users (as claimed by the company) ‘sticky’ to the site for a longer time. It is the same philosophy that had anyone from taxi booking apps like Rapido and Uber to bus-booking site RedBus to Google Maps, and even apparently, a bot on Telegram onboarding Delhi Metro.

It works on three levels. On one level, you could keep your active users, who otherwise use your app to book a train or flight ticket as and when they need it, using your app even more if there is an option for a daily commute — after all, you don’t travel long distance every day, do you? In a world of changing algorithms, and AI changing the rules of the game overnight, a loyal clientele is indeed a prized possession.

Secondly, having users coming to your app more number of times pushes up your numbers dramatically, which helps anywhere from a funding round to the initial boost you need when it comes to adding new services. In this chaotic post-AI online marketplace, niche markets are slowly dissolving and everybody makes a mad lunge at any other opportunity to branch out to, the reason why Zomato’s parent company is getting into events and quick commerce, or a bike taxi pioneer like Rapido is looking at going back to being a logistics provider also (the startup first tried delivery before finding its niche in bike taxi) as well, wait for it, food delivery! Or even a behemoth like Google, now offering metro tickets through its Maps app — everyone is dreaming of becoming the next WeChat (the Chinese super app which offers anything from social media to commerce to payments all in one single destination).

Thirdly, latching onto a mass transport system is an easy catchment to fish for new ‘sticky’ customers. And no one is as big as Delhi Metro, which had a peak of 81 lakh commuters just on one single day, this Raksha Bandhan. And all the operators, from Rapido to ixigo, are onboarding metro services in other cities, too.

“This is not revenue focused,” added Kotha, “Commercially, this tie-up doesn’t provide much, it is (actually) to make people engage more. One of the top metrics you can think of is average time users spent on the app, and our MAU (Monthly Active Users) can rise based on this.”

“Having a metro ticket booking service on our platform increases frequency and engagement on our platform, because people can actually now come and make more frequent transactions and it becomes more relevant for local use cases rather than just for intercity use cases,” explained ixigo Group CEO Aloke Bajpai, adding, “This is the first of many integrations we are planning for the future.”

As for Delhi Metro, it is part of its efforts to digitise its sprawling network, and as Delhi Metro general manager Sudhir Mittal quipped, “By offering availability and convenience through such digital platforms, we want to reduce the number of people who come to our physical counters!”

Will the strategy work? Customers historically have also been pretty finicky, preferring to use an app for its primary use case — take the example of WhatsApp, which has been trying to pivot into e-commerce, UPI and even as an AI tool, though its gargantuan user base in India still goes to it only for messaging and sharing. Tata’s venture into a super app, the Tata Neu, is still a trial-and-error, never having come into its own.