Surge is when you make good money. Too many drivers, plus 500,000 college students gone for the summer, means very little surge. We used to get 2x to 4x surge for hours at a time, now we’re lucky to hit 2x to 3x for 20 minutes. Not really enough time to get in multiple trips anymore, where I used to have more trips with surge rates than without. Making $300 a night was easily possible before, but very difficult now. I recall one night when we were at 3x to 4x surge for over two hours, and I made 3 trips from BC to the North End at $60 to $80 per ride…
I think the majority of Uber drivers in Boston are new these days. I keep hearing this from my riders lately. I had a couple of riders this weekend tell me that they thought that their previous driver was a taxi driver and that they didn’t use GPS and were rude.
I’ve heard the sentiment that “Uber is starting to go down hill” more and more lately. Whether that is true or not, it’s not a good reputation to have. Before this month, ALL of my riders would go on and on about how great Uber is and how much they spend on the service every week.
Just an FYI to the Phoenix Market. Had one of your people yesterday here in SD. She said that Uber was way better here because we offered water. That could be the difference between a 4 star and lower to a 5 star. It is BLOODY HOT in Phoenix.
Plus there can be legitimate errors too. Some drunk yahoo is waivering back and forth in your back seat after a ride trying to close it out. He thinks he has to swipe the stars and puts his finger on 1 and boom you have a 1 star rating. Or maybe he can’t even tell what star he is hitting. You never know.
I drive for both Lyft and Uberx. My experience so far with rating is about the same in between Uberx and Lyft. I was hoping I get 4.95 rating with Lyft because I heard that Lyft riders are more friendly than Uber riders. But so far, I am at 4.87 overall rating with Uberx at 1188 rides. And Lyft is 4.9 with 151 rides. I don’t know why others say Lyft is easier on rating compared to Uberx. I don’t feel it’s any easier.
Maybe they’re upset about surge rates, or how long they had to wait before you accepted, or any number of other things that you have no control over, so they gave you a low rating. The problem is that they don’t just rate the driver (even though that’s what they’re supposed to do), they rate their overall experience with Uber, which includes things beyond your control.
I haven’t figured that out exactly yet, but it definitely does. I had one week where my rating was 3.8, yet it also said that I got 5 stars on 19 out of 21 trips. So even if the other two trips were 1 star, that still wouldn’t come out to a 3.8 rating. My acceptance rate was around 45%, as I was trying to only accept rides in surge areas. It just makes no sense to take a trip at normal rates when there’s a 4x surge going on.
I started going offline when traveling back to surge areas after dropping someone off outside of one. I used to just ignore the requests until it became obvious that it was effecting my rating.
None of those and other variants are right or wrong. You basically have to physcologically asses them in the course of $5.00 trip, without cutting into their social media time, and engaging in conversation.
There are 3-4 year courses being made available at Universities these days where you sit with your back to the lectern and watch the Lecturer through a small rear-view mirror, trying to instil the skills of body and mind language reading through a small reflection. Beware you will be marked down for not keeping your eyes straight ahead aswell.
I agree. I think they started doing it when they set up different surge areas instead of having the whole city surge at the same time. I bet they were having a lot of drivers doing the same thing I was, so they wanted to penalize us for trying to maximize our profit at the expense of keeping their riders happy. I also received a text around the same time warning that low acceptance rates negatively impact rider experiences…
Mean ratings are fallacious with a five-star system. On what grounds would anybody give or receive a two or a three? A median rating would be a more accurate evaluation.
Most drivers have reported that surge pricing directly affects the rating the rider gives us. The higher the surge, the lower the rating. Riders often think they are rating the service (not the specifically the driver) and are rating the price paid. It doesn’t help that the rating prompt is on the same screen as their total fare (in big print in the center of the screen). During a surge event, the rider sees a large price tag and thinks, “This sucks, I just paid $XXX for a trip that normally costs me 1/4 of that” and ding us.