This has been my experience exactly (I’ve tried it in American and international markets, but don’t recall specific cities). I try them like once every 6 months and am always disappointed. You go thru the whole flow to find that there’s a Hotel Tonight fee and therefore the rate is more expensive (or at least isn’t cheaper) than you’d get by simply searching various other travel sites, and they don’t give you a guaranteed room type. Maybe if you don’t care about finding the best deal it’s a nice experience for people? (I most certainly do like to get the best deal though.)
And you don't have to explain the driver where you want to go. Other than being an extremely nice feature, I could see that decreasing lane blockage time as well.
The only time I ever had to explain to a taxi driver where to go was in an Uber, where the road was closed and google maps had no idea about it, and the driver clearly didn't know the local roads well enough to just pick a different one.
So true. The last few taxi rides I took all involved the driver asking how to get to the destination. Not which way was faster, but how to get there. They used gps as a callback.
So weird. Granted, my 3 taxi rides aren't statisticly significant, but it one of several factors that makes uber/lyft more comfortable.
I recently talked with a Uber driver, they cannot see the destination of the client, but he said he can specify the rough area where he wants to (eventually?) go and fares will take him close enough to that direction.
GP was talking about the initial setup of a ride, the app of your uber/lyft driver will already have your destination. The conventional taxi GPS won't. The app backend takes care of the cumbersome rider to driver to GPS dataflow.
Still, as a cyclist, I'd rather have lane blocking than drivers fiddling with their apps while driving.
"the app of your uber/lyft driver will already have your destination."
So does modern taxis. It's strange that when topic comes to taxis vs Uber/Lyft here, it looks like taxis in US are very archaic. I live in Europe and taxis started using apps/GPS/SMS/time and price approximation etc. long before Uber, is it so different in other parts of the world?
My (US) last taxi ride was 3 years ago and it had GPS the driver didn't want to use and no price estimation. The big deal was that it now had a device where I could slide my card instead of the driver doing so.
4 years ago was the last time I called for a taxi. Took 20 minutes to get it (lyft takes 3 min in the same time of day), and the first taxi company didn't service my area (but did cover the opposite side of the street I later discovered).
Yep. This happens to me all the time, and is not an edge case at all. Cooking in particular I think will be a much better experience with FaceId. I'm constantly washing my hands, and (at least on my iPhone 6) this means I'm constantly entering in my ~10 character lock code to have a look at the recipe.
This so called "guide" only has four things on it?
There are so many examples of this. What about Lyft itself? Isn't that just a "taxi"? By the (low) standards of this article, sure. Obviously though, that characterization would miss something since the entire taxi industry has been upended by the ride-sharing companies.
I think what the author did was think of four companies that were obviously silly in her mind, and characterized them as not wholly original inventions. Which of course they aren't. The thing is, it's rare to find the company that is. Sure it's easy to make fun of Soylent (not saying they're bad or good--just easy to make fun of), but I'm surprised by the author's shortsightedness on something like Lyft Shuttle. I don't know a single person who's said, "Buses? They're great as they are. That's a solved problem."
The only innovative thing? It also takes advantage of mobile phones to aggregate and coordinate passengers and drivers (much like regular Lyft), allowing smaller cars with more frequent service, and responding to demand. That's quite an innovation over a traditional bus.
I'm a huge fan of buses, and public transportation in general. I like riding buses and subways. I think it's semi-magical that you can get such a far distance on a fixed cost. But can they be improved? I would sure hope so.
I think you do have to be careful with excluding the poor from a new "invention" that is designed to make better the thing that a lot of poor people use. But I don't think poor people not using this initially is a good enough reason not to try.
I'm not an actual potential customer, but my 2¢ is that I was impressed when I saw Hilton and Chick-Fil-A. (Came to report the same issue, but on Safari.)
That's awesome. I am always skeptical of putting big brand names up there because I feel like it really takes away from our product. I get that we need some market validation, but I've always had this thing where I just really want people to try out UpKeep themselves to tell for themselves how awesome it really is!
I check it occasionally when doing a same-day hotel booking and I have never found a good deal. (I've only tried it for US hotels.) Very often the best price I have already found for a hotel will be matched on Hotel Tonight, but then they add their fee on top of it, making it a worse deal. And I don't like that they don't tell you about this fee till late in the purchase flow. Plus (and my info could be out of date on this point), HT doesn't tell you the bed situation in the room. Whereas on other booking sites, I know it's going to be two queens or whatever.
