Nevermind that the ride I canceled was 10+ minutes away, and was canceled immediately upon being booked.
Advantage: Lyft.
Without cancellation fees, drivers would have to eat the cost of whatever progress they made towards you.
While the policy varies by city, typically an UberX or UberBLACK vehicle can be cancelled for free within 2 minutes.
UberPOOL rides typically get billed cancellations immediately, because the canceling rider may have also added to the ETA of an Uber rider already in the vehicle.
Uber will occasionally waive the cancellation fee when the ETA of a POOL pickup is significantly higher than the prediction given pre-booking.
If you believe you may be eligible for a refund, you can contact Uber support. Read more here: https://help.uber.com/h/24e75a3b-cf44-44e4-abae-8c2dce3b07a3
Sorta? So one of the last times I cancelled a ride the driver was 8 minutes away which, not ideal, was fine. The problem was the driver was sitting at a restaurant. After 15 minutes passed he was still 8 minutes away but occasionally his car icon would move a little here and there (but staying at the restaurant).
I cancelled and it charged me a cancellation fee. Fortunately, after talking to a few friends of mine, it seems no matter why you get the cancellation fee (your fault or not) they will immediately refund it with credits if you complain.
Pretty aggravating experience, however.
The situation you describe happens pretty rarely--Uber has done over five billion trips in seven years, and typically drivers are fairly intent on finding their rider quickly and delivering a five-star experience.
In the future, perhaps various improvements to the product can mitigate the situation you describe. For example, Uber uses accelerometer data from the driver phone to improve ride safety. https://eng.uber.com/telematics/
If you have any thoughts on further improving the Uber experience, feel free to reach out.
Statistically maybe but around in the East Bay I have this happen with an Uber or Lyft driver almost once a week. The time I mentioned was just more extreme than the others (typically I wait and they start moving after a few minutes).
Can you put a number on that? It's anecdata but I feel like watching my friends request Ubers it's like 10% of requests. It's even worse at the airport. Adding extra padding time to account for failed requests is a fairly regular use pattern.
I just really love the company. I only left because my best-friend-in-the-whole-wide-world and I wanted to start a startup.
Although if the startup doesn't take off... I'd definitely consider going back to Uber.
No, without it, Uber would have to eat the cost of whatever progress drivers made towards the rider.
You tell the drivers to go somewhere (And punish them when they don't) - it's on Uber to pay them.
Automatically taking responsibility for all cancellations--whether malicious or not--would be a vector for fraud and abuse.
The fact that they, by default, delegate this to the customer is incredibly shitty.
If you're a rider or driver with a couple hundred trips, we can be sure that you're legitimate... unless your account has been hacked. Uber accounts are especially valuable to hackers, so we can imagine some percentage of legitimate accounts are making illegitimate ride requests.
If you're a first-time driver, then Uber has done a background check and a vehicle inspection, but there aren't any rider ratings, accelerometer data, etc. yet.
If you're a first-time rider using https://m.uber.com/ to take a ride on a cash-payments enabled product... then there isn't a whole lot of data to go on.
You can read more about what Uber does to prevent fraud at https://eng.uber.com/tag/fraud/
If you have tons of cool thoughts on fraud engineering and are interested in implementing those thoughts on a world-class platform, you can find fraud engineering-related jobs at https://www.uber.com/careers/list/?city=all&country=all&keyw...
You can have all the data in the world and still make bad decisions.
Sometimes it's cheaper to just pay the customer rather than hiring more engineers to work out a fraud detection algorithm.
I think Uber has realized this.
The email they sent me even confirms that. They must code their systems to still charge the fee even when they say they wont: http://imgur.com/a/JqTgT