Bengaluru: While several people often dream of embarking on a long road trip, the budget constraints that such a fun trip involves may not allow all to undertake the journey. However Prashant Shahi (21), a student from Bengaluru was able to book a trip upto North Korea via road at a nominal fare offered by cab aggregator Ola.
The 5-day round trip, that was booked to South Pyongan, North Korea was costing Rs 1,49,088 at a fare of Rs 10/km for the travelling distance of 13,840 kilometres.
As per media reports, Prashant had erroneously logged into the Ola app instead of the Google maps to check North Korea’s road connectivity to South Korea and was suprised to see the offer to hitch a ride to one of the most isolated countries in the world.
Interestingly, he even got a confirmatory message of his booking along with the driver’s name from Ola.
Prashant shared screenshots of the glitch with his friends before flagging off the issue to the cab company on Twitter but failed to get a response. It was another tweet, posted by a Rohit Menda that got the cab aggregator’s attention.
Responding to the tweet, Ola said that the issue was due to a technical glitch and and the bug has been rectified.
Later in a cheeky response to the development, Ola tweeted, “When we said we wanted to shoot for moon, we didn’t literally mean it ;) However, while we fix this issue, you can always take a flight to another country :)”
Meanwhile, on Monday, Ola and Uber’s drivers launched a nationwide strike, a large number of commuters in cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, Chennai, and Bengaluru depend on these online cab aggregators for their daily commute. The strike was called for by Maharashtra Navnirman Vahtuk Sena, the transport wing of Raj Thackeray led-MNS. The drivers had alleged that they weren’t getting their due.
