Umrah Taxi Service

The situation

Pilgrimage transport between Jeddah, Makkah and Madinah is a fixed set of routes with predictable pricing, but the client was quoting every journey by hand over messaging apps, at all hours, in two languages.

What we found

The quoting was not a judgement call. It was a lookup — route, vehicle class, passenger count, luggage — being performed manually because nothing had encoded it. The genuine judgement, the exceptions and the special requests, was a small fraction of the volume.

The other constraint was that travellers arrive on unreliable connections and are often not confident typing in either language. The flow had to survive that.

What we did

We built the fare logic as a route engine: fixed corridors, vehicle classes with real capacity and luggage limits, and time-of-day handling for the journeys that genuinely cost more.

The booking flow is short, works in English and Arabic, and does not depend on a fast connection. At the end it produces a structured summary — route, vehicle, passengers, time, price — and hands off to WhatsApp, because that is where these customers were already comfortable.

How it went

Enquiries arrive already structured and already priced. Dispatch sees a booking rather than the start of a negotiation, and the routine journeys no longer need a person awake to quote them.

What we would do differently

We treated Arabic as a translation layer over an English-first flow. It works, but a right-to-left-first design would have been better than a retrofit, and it would have cost less to do that way from the start than it did to correct afterwards.