The Spring Festival rush is over. How did Didi end up driving 1.9 million people home?

This ride-hailing company really is turning into a mobility platform

Regular article

From January 24 to March 3, 2016 — the period China's Ministry of Transport defines as the Spring Festival travel rush — people made 326 million train trips to another city, and 51.4 million trips by plane.

This year, unlike any before it, another 1.9 million people reached another city by Didi's intercity Hitch.

Zhuo Yue was one of those 1.9 million.

"Didi intercity Hitch: the road home is no longer hard. A trip planned for tomorrow, moved up to the small hours. Grateful." Zhuo Yue, a corporate lawyer in Jiangyin, borrowed Didi's advertising slogan for this Weibo post. It was 12 minutes to midnight. After much back-and-forth, she had made it through the front door before Chinese New Year's Eve.

Zhuo Yue comes from Yancheng in Jiangsu province and works in Jiangyin, also in Jiangsu, about three hours away by car. She usually takes the long-distance bus. But work kept pushing her trip back, and she could not fix a date until the 27th day of the last lunar month, two days before New Year's Eve. So she tried Didi's intercity Hitch for the first time.

This year it was hard to miss Hitch's offer to take you home. For days on end, opening the Didi app brought up a Hitch pop-up ad; before the travel rush began, there was even a promotion with 500 yuan in subsidies...

Zhuo Yue heard about it from a post on Didi's WeChat official account. She posted an intercity trip on Hitch and settled on leaving after work on the 28th. Two hours before departure, the car owner told her he was cancelling.

"He had to take two relatives home, so there was no room for me. I had to keep looking," Zhuo Yue told QDaily. "Other car owners kept getting in touch, suggesting we leave in the middle of the night or the next morning."

After chatting with several car owners in the Didi app, she found one who could leave at her original time. To be safe, she sent all the driver details Didi showed her to her family WeChat group. "My parents phoned me several times on the way, worried about my safety," she said.

The in-app messaging, the intercity trip posts, the safety verification Zhuo Yue relied on — Didi Hitch had built up all of these step by step in the six-odd months since it launched.

Hitch began recruiting car owners before its official launch in June.

"We made a very bold decision: we put the Hitch tab in the app before the design was finished," Shan Yi, Didi Hitch's product director, told QDaily. When users first saw the Hitch tab, the feature had not been fully built. "Passengers are curious. They'd tap it to have a look, and that's how they'd learn about Hitch."

The team followed up with a WeChat campaign, "One Fen to Rescue a Subway Dog" — "subway dogs" being the city's crammed commuters — to build interest among the people it wanted to reach.

By the time Hitch officially launched, 1 million car owners had already signed up.

Shan Yi had just been lured to Didi by a former colleague, Huang Jieli, in time for the first version of Hitch to go live. At the same moment, the whole Didi app was being remade.

Until then, users switched between Didi's services at the bottom of the screen. Soon after Hitch launched, the page took roughly its present form, with tabs for Premier, Express, Hitch and the rest moved to the top. "So that it could expand," Shan Yi told us.

Hitch also launched in the middle of a new round of the subsidy war between Didi and Uber. In May, Uber began paying large guaranteed bonuses: a Beijing driver who completed just 70 rides in a week earned 7,000 yuan. A few weeks later, Didi announced it would spend 1 billion yuan subsidizing its own program, through passenger discounts and driver bonuses.

But Hitch was, in every way, a different business from the "taxi-hailing" in Didi's old name, and it competed in a different market from the one where Uber and Didi bought share with subsidies.

Didi began with taxis, then added the pricier Premier and the cheaper Express. Whether or not the car that came for you had a taxi company's roof light, it was usually driven by someone who drove for a living, providing a dedicated service. Hitch was designed from the start to take only passengers going the same way: car owners set their commuting route, then picked up passengers' orders along it.

That is how Hitch began.

Mr. Zhang signed up as a Hitch car owner about two months after the launch. Every day he drives 60 kilometers round trip between Jinsong, on Beijing's East Third Ring Road, and the Shangdi tech park beyond the North Fifth Ring Road. "It's just to have someone to talk to on the road, and to cover some of the petrol," he told us.

Most Hitch car owners are like Mr. Zhang.

"They're usually office workers: one ride on the way to work, one on the way home. Our data shows an average of two rides a day," Shan Yi told QDaily.

Unlike Didi's earlier services, Hitch did not depend on street teams. Didi itself won the 2013 "taxi-app war" through aggressive offline promotion. But apart from street promotion in subway stations, office buildings and housing compounds at launch, the Hitch team won almost all its users from inside the app.

"Hitch had taxis and Express to build on. Lots of passengers using taxis and Premier tapped on Hitch and became Hitch users. Recruiting car owners worked the same way," Shan Yi said.

Later, the product managers found demand beyond commuting. Every month, some of Didi Hitch's product engineers left Didi's headquarters beyond the North Fifth Ring Road for the customer-service center in another office building, and spent a day working as customer-service staff, handling complaints and feedback themselves.

Uber tied every driver incentive to the ratings passengers gave on their phones, and offered no customer-service hotline. Didi measured more. An internal contest called "Sunflower" ranked departments such as Express, Premier and Hitch on user experience, judged by how willing passengers were to recommend the service and by complaint rates. (A contest called "Don't Spend Wildly" judged how efficiently subsidies were used, and one called "Blue Lotus" judged how efficiently marketing spread the word.)

User research turned up more needs beyond commuting. One answer was the "temporary route" feature, added soon after launch.

Many car owners go shopping, out to eat or on outings at weekends, and would happily take a passenger along. "These are one-off routes," Shan Yi said. "Without temporary routes, the app would be a real hassle to use."

And because Hitch rides are usually booked in advance, passengers generally wait longer than for Premier or Express. To make them more willing to wait after posting a trip, the product team built a wall of car-owner profile pictures.

"It lets passengers see that there are people going their way, and it adds a social feel. You can tap a picture and see what car someone drives and what industry they work in," Shan Yi said. According to Didi's internal data, passengers tap an average of three pictures each time they wait.

Hitch's biggest change also came from user research. The product team found many unlicensed cabs shuttling between Beijing and its satellite towns.

Under Guomao Bridge, in the heart of Beijing's central business district, dozens of unlicensed cabs tout for passengers to Yanjiao, in Hebei province, every day. From eight or nine in the morning until two at night, every passerby hears the drivers' cry: "Yanjiao, Yanjiao! Ten yuan, ten yuan! One seat left!"

These unlicensed cabs all work as shared rides. That gave the Hitch product team an idea, and at the end of September they launched intercity Hitch.

The launch fell just before the National Day "Golden Week" holiday, and the still-experimental feature quickly reached an average of 10,000 orders a day.

But intercity Hitch's biggest opportunity, and its biggest test, was the Spring Festival rush three months later.

Didi Hitch version updates

2015.5

Hitch recruitment appears in the Didi app; recruiting of car owners begins

2015.6.1

Hitch launches

2015.9.25

Intercity Hitch launches

2015.11.16

Didi announces intercity Hitch will join the Spring Festival rush

2016.1.11

Advance booking for intercity Hitch extended to 30 days

2016.1.20

Passengers can browse intercity car owners' trips

2016.2.8

Intercity Hitch completes 810,000 rides in the pre-holiday rush

2016.3.3

The rush ends; intercity Hitch has completed 1.9 million orders

The whole of Didi began preparing for the rush in December, with a great deal of groundwork in late December and early January. This was shortly after the Ministry of Transport issued rules restricting private-car services; had they been strictly enforced, we might have had to say goodbye to cheap Premier rides.

"Every business unit had to think about it: anything that could ease the pressure of the rush, we had to do," Shan Yi told QDaily.

For the rush, Premier offered a Spring Festival flat fare of 49 yuan for airport runs, and Express announced it now covered 400 cities. But no service suited the timing of the rush like Hitch. Only Hitch's supply and demand rose together.

The closer the New Year came, the harder it was to get an Express or Premier car, and the higher prices climbed. Yet that was when intercity Hitch had the most drivers, and when passengers most wanted to get home.

To prepare, Hitch changed the product further.

At the end of December, the Hitch home screen was redesigned. The map on the main page was removed, giving the screen its current look, with the intercity button placed in the middle.

A seat-sharing option was added at the same time. Passengers who chose to share paid even less, as little as 40% of the normal fare.

Because intercity trips are hard to plan, Didi extended Hitch's advance-booking window from seven days to 30 before the rush began, to match the railways.

A version released shortly before the New Year let passengers browse intercity trips. Even when the system found no driver going their way, passengers could look through trips themselves and contact car owners.

Before the rush, to gather feedback, Didi's product team tried intercity Hitch themselves, setting out from Beijing, Hangzhou and Guangzhou.

"What struck me most were the situations intercity car owners worry about: a passenger with luggage too big to fit, or finding out only at pickup that the passenger has a child or a pet with them," Shan Yi told QDaily.

So Hitch added "trip preferences." When posting a trip, passengers can say in advance whether they have large luggage, whether they are bringing a child or a pet, and whether they want a non-smoking driver. They can also list their industry, hometown and other basics, to give the two of them more to talk about. Car owners use this to decide whether to take a passenger along.

Ms. Liang, who lives in Shenzhen and sells pet supplies, takes intercity Hitch mainly so she can bring her pet. "I have a dog, and she goes everywhere with me," she told us. "Maybe I've been lucky — every owner I've met has liked pets. But I also promise the owner in advance that she won't bark, won't fuss and won't smell."

Ms. Liang is far from alone. According to Didi, the 1.9 million Hitch passengers took 32,000 pets with them during the rush.

Mr. Zheng, a car owner in Tianjin, speaks for the other side. He told QDaily that besides safety, punctuality and smoking, he also thinks about pets. "I don't take passengers with pets," he said.

Trip preferences were built for exactly these needs. Passengers and car owners can see what the other expects before setting off, then talk it over by private message.

Every Didi service has the same in-app messaging, but on intercity Hitch, passengers and car owners clearly message each other more often and at greater length.

Intercity departure times are hard to pin down, so more has to be arranged in advance. And intercity passengers and car owners spend longer together than on trips within a city, usually more than two hours, so they need more in common.

"The best ride is probably between two people who half know each other," Shan Yi said. "If you know each other too well, there are no surprises. If you're complete strangers, it's awkward." Private messaging, trip preferences and personal profiles all exist to bring two strangers about to share a car quickly to that half-familiar state.

The Hitch product team sees socializing as something built into Hitch. "Sharing a car is a clever kind of offline socializing," Shan Yi told QDaily. "Even people without social skills relax and open up in a one-on-one, semi-public setting."

Huang Jieli, head of Didi's Hitch business unit, has stressed Hitch's social side in many interviews. Of Didi's business lines — Premier, Express, Hitch, Bus and designated driving among them — it is the only person-to-person (C2C) platform. Didi rarely uses the vague word "social" internally, but private messaging, trip preferences, free rides and thank-you tips all steer the experience in that direction.

Whether or not Hitch makes sense as a way to socialize, one thing is certain: Didi moves fast.

When Didi and Kuaidi merged on February 14, 2015, Didi offered only taxis and pricey Premier cars. Uber, with its ultra-cheap People's Uber, had already won market share in China's first- and second-tier cities.

Within a year, Didi has been turning from a taxi-hailing app into a real mobility platform.

Didi's expansion in 2015

2015.2

Didi Dache and Kuaidi Dache merge

2015.4

Didi launches Express, a cheaper version of Premier

2015.6

Didi Hitch launches

2015.7

Didi launches designated driving

2015.8

Didi Bus launches

2015.9

The Didi Dache ("Didi Taxi") app is officially renamed Didi Chuxing ("Didi Mobility")

2015.9

Intercity Hitch launches

2015.10

Didi launches a test-drive service