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Comment by JCM9 | Hacker News Reader

Uber has turned into garbage and I’ve stopped using them. Ironically they’ve increasingly become the transport option with a terrible customer experience, which is what they set out to change in the first place.

The final straw is when I had multiple drivers in a row cancel on me before pickup. When I finally had enough I canceled the ride and then was charged a “cancelation charge” for canceling. The fact that I only canceled after multiple drivers canceled on ME leaving me waiting for 30 minutes was lost on Uber. Since then I’ve sent all my business elsewhere. Per the OP trying to get a human at Uber to apply basic logic to a situation is essentially impossible.

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I enabled 2FA on my account and then lost my phone and couldn't find where I saved the backup codes. I tried to contact their support to see what my options were but that was completely useless. Bots and canned responses. No humans whatsoever. After many, many emails I finally got (what I think) was an actual human to reply and all they sent me was their support article on how to change my password. I tried to explain why that doesn't work but they had no idea what I was talking about and they just sent me the same support article again. Uber accounts are tied to your phone number, so I pretty much lost access to Uber completely unless I feel like changing my phone number. Maybe I'll try my old Grand Central/Google Voice number but I doubt that will work since they probably think it's a bot number.

I bet if I include words like "attack" or "sexual assault" in the email then I'll get past their first-line bot response filter. But I don't care about it that much. Fuck 'em.

In any case, I use Lyft exclusively now. Which is fine because I've found that pretty much every Uber driver is also a Lyft driver.

Yeah, I knew this whole space was a race to the bottom the first time when a driver turned up with two phones with one running Uber and the other Lyft. When I asked them how they choose they just said which ever wants to fight harder for their business today and pay them the most. The drivers have zero loyalty to these companies.

Which is exactly how much loyalty the drivers owe the companies!

Wait, who is it a race to the bottom for?

The drivers were sold that they are contractors who make their own hours and don't have a boss.

It makes perfect sense that they are trying to get the best rate, anything else would be leaving money on the table right?

>The drivers were sold that they are contractors who make their own hours and don't have a boss.

Which was total BS from the start - when they do choose to work, they’re told (by a boss) when/where they do their work. Hardly “own hours and own boss”.

Oh, I completely agree. Whenever I look at the *-share economy, it looks like the idea is "We take the dollar and share the pennies with you".

This is exactly what contractors are supposed to do. The whole point of contracting is that it is a market for labor. The only bad part of the story is that the guy needed two phones, he should have been able to do it all on a single phone.

>> The drivers have zero loyalty to these companies.

Good for them. As the saying goes in boxing - if you want loyalty, buy a dog.

How is this a bad thing?

Then again, in case of 2FA maybe you wouldn't want there to exist ways around it, or someone could impersonate you to get your credentials?

nah. We live in the real world where people make mistakes and need help to fix them. I would be fine with some kind of a KYC process to recover the account, but they have no such thing. Or I wasn't able to get to it at least.

Your credit card company is the entity you can expect to apply basic logic.

In the short term, that logic will be to refund your money to keep your annual spend, but not to bother Uber. In the long term, this could raise the fees Uber pays for credit card services.

Long before Uber, a JAX airport auto rental was improperly tacking an $8 fee onto every "paid in full" Hotwire reservation. This can add up over a year. When challenged, they lied and claimed it was an upgrade. American Express of course made no effort to protest this, they just refunded my $8. Not very satisfying, but still my best course of action.

A credit card chargeback should be used as the last resort, and for good reason: many service providers will permanently suspend your account if you do one.

There's typically a thread or two per year where some poor sap gets double charged by Google or similar company, uses a chargeback and then gets their entire account suspended. Poof, all your mails are now permanently gone.

So yeah, only do it if you're OK with never using Uber again.

Uber drivers want to make more money. Uber wants to be profitable. It turns out the two may not be reconcilable. The cancellation behavior you noticed is a direct result of this. The way it works is that Uber is trying to force drivers to accept rides if they’re available. There are many rides drivers do not want, usually because they can’t actually be delivered profitably at Uber’s published price. What the drivers really want are the premium rides, but Uber will send them plenty of chaff to go along with that wheat. So the drivers game the system and cancel after accepting.

There are scenarios where this is highly predictable. Airports at rush hour will inevitably get this behavior in most places I fly. (Note: I only use Uber internationally, domestically I use Lyft. I do not know how Uber works within the US anymore.)

The solution, if you want to use it, is to pay for the up-market rides. You magically will suddenly stop being canceled. Then Uber goes back to being the way it used to work (the drivers are also more pleasant when they’re actually making money to shuffle you from point A to point B). Or you can do what I’ve taken to doing now that I’m traveling again, and try public transit. Since I mostly travel to major European cities these days, this is usually quite reasonable, and often faster than a car anyway.

> I had multiple drivers in a row cancel on me before pickup

I had that exact same experience. Some of them even messaged me encouraging me to please cancel for them so that they would not incur a penalty. (I refused.)

I've been using yellow cabs in cities again. Simple & straightforward.

I haven't used Uber much since the early days when it was honestly a bit of a revelation. Before that your options for getting home from central London after nightclubs closed were terrible (usually standing in a queue for some dodgy taxi company where half the time it was an unlicenced taxi).

It worked really well for me in those early years. To the point I'd take an Uber home from work if the weather sucked or I was otherwise not in the mood to walk.

The only time I ever had an issue was trying to take a taxi to an airport hotel from the train station nearby. Apparently all of the taxis were waiting in a queue at the airport and noone was going to lose their place in the queue over a 5 minute journey.

>they’ve increasingly become the transport option with a terrible customer experience, which is what they set out to change in the first place.

That's not what they set out to change at all. Their goal from the very beginning was exclusively to change who gets all the money for terrible customer service.

Fair enough :-)

I had the same thing happen in my city. After I had been waiting for 20-30 minutes, I was attacked by a stranger and left unconscious and bloody in a nearby alleyway. After explaining this to Uber, they informed me that the 'no-show' fee I was charged would stand. It wasn't their fault I was attacked, but I will never use Uber again.

> I had multiple drivers in a row cancel on me before pickup. When I finally had enough I canceled the ride and then was charged a “cancelation charge” for canceling.

I've had the exact some scenario with Bolt.

I think they started to allow drivers to cancel rides so they can claim they are not employees. So now drivers cancel the rides that are no very profitable.

In Australia they have become more expensive than alternatives. It's better to grab a traditional cab these days.

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