Let say “Uber for Business” is more expensive and you work for a large company that has enough business travelers where they have their own check in terminal out of SEA like where I worked when I did a lot of business travel (worked remotely and flew into SEA a few times). The time saved by both the business travelers and the reimbursement team would have been well worth the extra cost. Especially when either the client was paying for travel anyway (the consulting department) or sales was bringing in tens of millions in revenue.
Even if I had been aware of getting a taxi directly when we went to DC last month or had been aware of the DiDi app in Costa Rica or the local app in Israel, as a tourist, I am still going to use Uber because everything is one central place, I am on vacation so I’m not that price sensitive and especially in Costa Rica, I know my Spanish is still rough and the Uber app automatically translates to English.
I would personally be very annoyed if my company asked me to reconcile Uber rides to save a few bucks when I know how much money I directly and indirectly make the company when I’m on/over a project.
When I've worked for a large company, I had to spend more time on expense reports, not less. However much I was being paid seemed to have on relevance to how much time I had to spend on keying things into Concur (and no, we didn't have admin staff who would do it for us).
If you're not "price sensitive" on vacation, good for you. If I'm on vacation in Israel (or DC), I would prefer rides that show up faster and are cheaper. If you prefer to use the Uber app for everything, that's fine, but I doubt there is much of a use case for "people who don't want to install an extra app and are OK with paying 15% more for everything".
If you have mastered the art of user acquisition where you can get enough people to install an extra hypothetical Waymo app that is only useful in a few cities, not available during peak times with the value proposition that it may be 20% cheaper, you should really be starting your own business.
Well funded startups haven’t been able to beat the incumbents profitably. How many people that can afford to fly from the US to Isreal or anywhere else that requires crossing an ocean are going to be price sensitive enough to research the local ride sharing spp they never heard of to save a few dollars?
Even working for a startup, once you take into account all of the other costs if business travel, is saving 15% on Uber rides really meaningful? Before working for AWS (no longer there), I worked for a 70 person startup and even there they didn’t quibble about spending money for minor quality of life improvements. This wasn’t unicorn by any means. Just a run of the mill enterprise SaaS company in the medical industry.
I'll simply leave this on the table: Gett is completely dominant in Israel versus Uber, and Uber is stuck playing second fiddle to Gett where they simply resell Gett's service and have to do so at a markup. Because they can't drivers even interested using the Uber app, because the Gett app is better. (Note: Uber completely gave up in 2023, and you can't book at all in Israel using Uber anymore.)
It would appear that competitors to Uber can indeed exist. And yes, after flying to Israel I still care about cost (or my employer does). Two weeks on the ground can cost as much for taxis as the flight would.
If Gett has nationwide coverage for a whole country yes. If my Spanish was better (working on it, we are planning to snowbird in San Jose in a couple of years), I would use the DiDi app while there.
But that’s completely different than using Waymo in the few cities where it is available and still using Uber everywhere else in the country and constantly not having rides available during peak times.
Waymo would never have enough cars to handle peak capacity that are just sitting idle most of the time.
Even if I had been aware of getting a taxi directly when we went to DC last month or had been aware of the DiDi app in Costa Rica or the local app in Israel, as a tourist, I am still going to use Uber because everything is one central place, I am on vacation so I’m not that price sensitive and especially in Costa Rica, I know my Spanish is still rough and the Uber app automatically translates to English.
I would personally be very annoyed if my company asked me to reconcile Uber rides to save a few bucks when I know how much money I directly and indirectly make the company when I’m on/over a project.