Vromtu is an app that can help you to find the nearest shuttle pools to travel between Bandung and Jakarta. By entering your point of origin and your destination, Vromtu will provide a list of all the available pools as well as shuttle schedules and a map of the destination. The service is available as a free app for Windows Phone and as a web app. Currently the team is also working on BlackBerry and iOS apps.
Ever since the Cipularang toll road was opened in 2005, traveling between Bandung and Jakarta has become even more popular than ever before and it has been marked by the spike in the number of shuttle and delivery services that provide transportation between the two cities. With travel time cut down to two hours or less on average, it can sometimes be faster than traveling within Jakarta itself.
There are dozens of shuttle bus companies with pools in various spots in both cities and it can be a pain to find out where exactly their pools are and what time the shuttles are scheduled to depart. Having to check out schedules on the shuttle’s individual websites can be tedious and impractical especially when it’s for an unplanned trip.
The app is meant to make life a little less complicated. While the service isn’t perfect, it’s almost a godsend to have this app available on your mobile device. It has information on the locations of hundreds of pools from nine shuttle services. All you have to do is input your departure point and intended destination. If that’s not enough, the app also lists the phone number of each pool for further inquiries.
The Windows Phone app is not location aware, which means it won’t be able to detect your location and suggest the nearest spot automatically, although the web app does have this ability. A number of searches may seem off but it should be relatively easy to rectify. For example, looking for a shuttle point near Kemang, South Jakarta, shows results for Kemanggisan, which is all the way across the city in West Jakarta.
Unfortunately the app is currently only a directory as there’s no way to book tickets for the shuttles from the app. This relative inconvenience is mitigated somewhat by the inclusion of the phone numbers which you can use to make a booking.
Understandably having a booking system built in to the app would require further discussions with the shuttle services themselves and for the team of developers behind the app, it might be a little more complicated than populating the database with shuttle pool information.
It’s not a stretch to imagine what can be improved or added on top of this version 1 release. Vromtu has the potential to become more than just a simple directory app.
*We made a mistake in thinking that Vromtu was done by the team behind Taxify. We regret the error made and posted the corrections.
