Be ready Uber users because there may be a few extra fees on your next ride bill. Uber is now adding a bunch of new fees for riders and making it more better for drivers who may be reluctant to wait for slow passengers, driving longer distances, or get hit with cancellations at the last minute before the driver arrives. What does this mean for you? Well, it means some trips may now become a bit more expensive for you, especially for those of you that live out of the way and an Uber driver has to take longer to get to you.
Aaron Schildkrout says that they have acknowledged the pains of driving long distances before the rider gets into the car, and that some trips, especially suburban ones, don’t feel fair for drivers. These extra fees are aimed “precisely at solving those pain points,” he said.
Drivers have overtime complained to Uber that long trips “can feel like a gamble.” Start today, however, drivers will now earn standard time and distance rates when driving long distance for pickup, in addition to the standard fare. “So if it’s a 40-minute pickup, which hopefully never happens and is extremely rare, it would be some segment of 40 minutes,” he said.
When these charges will kick in will depend on the market and the length of the pickup. Generally speaking, drivers will start earning the extra rates after 8 or 11 minutes of driving to pick up a driver. This, of course, depends on the city.
Speaking in terms of cancellation policy and to charge a fee to time and distance, Uber seems to have tackled this issue as well. “We’ve updated our technology to actually detect progress by the driver toward the rider so we can be more nuanced about when to charge a rider a cancellation fee,” Schildkrout said.
