DiDi China: Ride Hailing

We used this app a lot while traveling in China. Sometimes Chinese drivers can be shady- we had one that talked on his phone and drove recklessly and one that made three intentional detours that resulted in a much higher increased fare. DiDi asks you to enable recording while on the drive- do this because when you have a bad experience they ask if they can access the recording. There are also buttons to immediately call the police if you find yourself in a bad situation. When we had the driver who took the detours, the app asked immediately if detours had been taken, and only charged us the estimate. The only downside, sometimes it doesn’t translate into English automatically so one of my friends had to take a picture with her phone on a translating app to see what it said. It has a great feedback section for every ride!

The best and only Taxi App you can trust while living and/or traveling in China! Just do yourself the favor of downloading the app, set up International credit card and navigate the user interface in order to familiarize your self with it. It’s unquestionably not easy to navigate anything in China without knowing Chinese and inputting addresses and/or locations can be challenging in any local app. Yet, this is due to the fact that using Pinyin (Chinese-Romanization) writing it’s difficult if you have not taken Chinese. Regardless... of this, there are no other truly viable options with an English friendly GUI, that gets you where you need to go. We have been using DiDi for nearly four months on a daily basis and we could not live without it.

A flight attendant was sexually assaulted and killed couple days ago by a didi driver. I’m only rating didi a five star here so that people can see my comment. I was using didi a Friday night in some busy areas in Beijing by my self when the didi driver locked me in his car and ‘jokingly’ threatened to rob me. He was playing with the car lock and be like I know you have money and stuff. I called didi right after and didi says that I’d have to go talk to the police and there’s not much that they can do. The driver started to text me a bunch of really awful curses and threaten me that if I ever go to the police he will find me cus he knows will I live. In the end didi paid me 5 yuan for compensation and that’s it. Girls, never ever ride didi by yourself especially at night.

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Traveling in Shanghai and don't speak any Mandarin. Needed a way to get around so tried DiDi. Used it 10 times. First major issue is the English interface for entering starting location and destination is maddeningly bad. Locations super easily found in Google maps don't seem to exist. After 10 mins of trial and error I can usually find a location nearby, but often not the actual location. The credit card payment only accepts Visa, but doesn't tell you that (or at least that was the issue for me). After 10-15 minutes of frustratingly trying to set locations, the pick up and drop off worked great and payment seemed to work fine. One tricky part is the driver might text you in the app and it was in chinese. There are some default replies that you can give, but was never really sure if we understoood each other. Seems like lots of easy fixes, but foreigners are clearly not their target market.

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The most useless rendition since didi got a hold of Uber and royally messed up a functional system. The app always chooses to show your pick up pin as the nearest ‘popular’ spot or something, and that is often across the street or around the corner from where you actually are and drivers picking up will mostly be going the opposite way from where you need to go. When you cancel due to this idiocy, they automatically renew your request so if you aren’t paying attention another driver might already be on the way even though you may have already flagged a cab. Try also doing this with frozen fingers and the pin constantly moving when you try to zoom the screen and you have yourself a recipe for some serious rage! Btw I speak Chinese - so this review isn’t coming from frustration of being unable to communicate with drivers, just from the utterly stupid user interface of this app.