Grab aims to be the only app you need for Southeast Asia holidays – here’s why

Grab is leaning towards being a top choice for Southeast Asia travel needs, as the company announced up to a dozen new features for its superapp. 

These updates were announced at its annual product showcase (GrabX 2026) held in Jakarta, Indonesia. They cut across domestic use (Grab calls it “local life”), regional tourism (“effortless travel”), and easier transactions between users and merchants on the fringes (“business empowerment”).

While these are mostly work-in-progress , many are fundamental to the expected convenience of the superapp, since it serves as a bridge across a variety of cultures, currencies, and languages in the SEA region.

Holidays and travel with less friction

To make holidays feel seamless in Grab-available territories, the app now offers a travel checklist to guide users through essentials such as check-in information, eSIMs, travel passes, and passport reminders. Grab also improved its arrival guidance by directing users to the correct luggage belt and pickup point for rides, beyond simple pickup points for riders.

A new addition to its partner apps sub-menu is GrabStays. Created with the help of Nuitee (an Irish company that offers travel tech infrastructure to providers), GrabStays offers last-minute hotel and accommodation bookings and works with its GrabCoin reward programme. It’s also integrated with the ride-hailing portion of the Grab app, so you can travel to the booked hotel in one fluid sequence.

Food recommendations are now user contributed in social media format (à la Dianping or Xiaohongshu style), and the app uses AI to learn a user’s food preferences. Grab calls this feature Discover by Grab, and it’s integrated with its ride-hailing and food delivery services. It also supports in-app payments for those who want to use a secure payment method and receipts.

Finally, GrabPay for Travel is a new payment method that accepts the region’s national QR payment codes and works with your debit/credit card linked to your Grab account. This reduces the need to fiddle with more banking apps, foreign e-wallets, and one-off situations where a vendor doesn’t accept card payments.

Day-to-day needs, made easier

For local, day-to-day users, the ride-hail portion of Grab is taking a pandan leaf from GrabFood’s menu to introduce Group Ride.

It’s similar to carpooling: you can share a ride with up to 4 people, with four unique pick-up/drop-off points, and the app will automatically split the payments among all riders.

Grab More is a new GrabFood feature that allows users to add one other nearby unaffiliated restaurant to an existing food delivery order, so folks who want to eat different things from the same neighbourhood don’t have to pay two delivery fees.

GrabMaps for Consumers now uses Grab’s collected map data to make recommendations on travel time, traffic conditions, and indoor navigation.

It’s so advanced now that it can suggest the best time to leave (not ETA!) so that you can arrive on time (based on your calendar’s saved appointments).

There’s also the option to use Grab’s built-in AI Assistant to help narrow down your search results, based on your unique or complex requirements (e.g. organising a food gathering with dietary restrictions, number of eaters, for both dining out or deliveries). 

In addition, there’s also Grab Shopping Agent for item searches using photos, voice notes, or a grocery shopping list, and all the items you need are automatically added to your Grab shopping cart.

Easier integration with businesses and merchants reliant on Grab

For businesses, Grab is adding Virtual Store Manager, providing another platform for remote supervision of physical outlets. It’s compatible with existing CCTV hardware, and its AI-powered computer vision can monitor metrics like store hours, hygiene, staffing levels, queue lengths, foot traffic, conversion rates, and more.

Cloud Printer gets more features — orders to the store or shop are now auto-printed, and kitchen staff can scan a QR code to signal if an order is ready for pickup or delivery. If a store is closed, Cloud Printer can also automatically pause itself if it does not detect any activity for a while.

Tap To Pay turns a merchant’s phone into a point-of-sales (POS) terminal to receive contactless payments, and it requires no onboarding or special tools. This allows merchants to receive QR code payments from GrabMerchant.

For Grab driver-partners, the app now offers an AI Assistant that can advise on Grab policies on demand, or help with minor tasks like texting passengers while the driver is focused on driving. 

How is Grab so sure that all these can work smoothly when they’re live?

Beta testers, of course. 

Interested users can register for Grab’s Early Access Programme to try out beta features before they get released to the wider Grab userbase. Information about new features is usually shared on Grab’s corporate blog, and sign-ups for beta testing are available on Grab’s official website.