Careem launches rewards program in Pakistan

Careem has launched its rewards program in Pakistan. Aimed at encouraging loyalty and promoting donations towards charity causes, the rewards program works with any financial activity performed through the Careem application — except using Careem Packages option to pay for rides.

Careem is working hard to improve the in-app experience with improvements in its wallet functionality and peer to peer credits transfer. The ultimate goal of Careem is to work towards becoming a complete digital payment platform, something which they have already started working towards. Careem rewards is another step which will encourage users to further use the app and make sure rides and transactions through the app are properly incentivized.

How does it work?

Careem rewards work automatically. There’s no opt-in or opt-out option that you can use. Whenever you book and pay for a ride using Careem, you will automatically get reward points against it. How many you get, is dependent on your status in the rewards program.

• Regular users will earn 10 points for every 20 PKR spent in Careem app.
• Gold users (those who have taken more than 15 rides in a single month), will earn 50 percent more rewards than regular users.

How can you use these points?

Careem offers a number of different channels to use these earned rewards. You can tap your inner charitable side and donate the points toward planting trees, or educating and feeding underprivileged children. Careem has partnered with The Citizen Foundation (TCF), United Nations World Food Program (WFP), and World Wildlife Foundation (WWF) to make sure that your donations reach their intended recipients. This is a very nice gesture from Careem and hopefully, they can find even more ways for their users to do some good in society.

If you are not in a giving mood and want the rewards all for yourself, Careem does offer to convert the rewards to Careem Credit, which can then be used to pay for Rides (or for buying other things from retailers once Careem’s long-rumored digital payment platform launches). You can convert 900 points into 50 Pakistani Rupees and 3,000 points into 200 Pakistani Rupees.

Uber and Lyft, two of the biggest ride-sharing platforms in the world, offer rewards programs in some of the countries that they operate in; most notably the North American countries. However, Pakistani consumers are not used to seeing a tech company launching such initiatives for the local audience and treating them as first-class citizens. Careem rightfully sees Pakistan as a huge market for its future plans and is accordingly taking steps like this reward system to ensure that Pakistani consumers’ experience with Careem service remains excellent, something which should be duly appreciated and acknowledged.