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Providing passengers with the flexibility to book a ride through their smartphones and get the taxi to their doorsteps. These on-demand ride-hailing services have won the hearts of the passengers and are being used widely all around the world. Uber is the first among all, who has ripped the most out of all the benefits and today have achieved a unique identity in the market and a loyal customer base.
Uber is the ride-hailing Goliath serving in more 65 countries and it holds the record of covering over 600 cities all over the earth. Therefore, surely Uber has gained more control over the ride-hailing with its reliable and trustworthy services. Offering profits for drivers and better facility for passengers, Uber has taken over the ride-hailing industry with zero investment in vehicles. Yes, Uber drivers own their own vehicles which they drive under the title of Uber and serve the customers.
Lyft is one of the toughest competitors of Uber. With the increasing demand for ride-hailing services, there have been many new tough competitions in the market and Lyft is leading all of them with its more simplified Uber-like features and relatively transparent pricing schemes. Therefore, there persists the discussion of which one to choose among these two, whether Uber remains the king or Lyft brings up the change in the throne? Here are the few factors mentioned that can distinguish both from each other and can help you decide which one fits in your criteria and wins the hearts of passengers.
While Uber has finally gone public and has invited people to invest in, Lyft followed the footsteps and went public too. While the competition continues to become more and stiffer, it has been proved that both are not in the mood of quitting or letting any one of them lead. While Uber was recently noted to be raising $600 million of funding, Lyft has raised the funds amounting $2.9 Billion in the capital.
Passengers/users who have used both the application will agree that there is not much difference among the features that both are offering. However, some features in Uber and Lyft are named differently and some which were previously present in both, one or two have been removed for a temporary duration of time.
The noteworthy thing here is that both offer ride sharing. While Uber has named it as Uber Pool, Lyft likes to call it Shared Ride. The ride-sharing feature is basically sharing your ride with a stranger whose drop location comes in between your pickup and drop location. This helps in sharing the fare of the ride and also supports the green movement as it helps in saving the fuel by reducing the number of vehicles used and promotes the savings on ride fare.
Also, there are numerous applications out there who offer similar features like Uber and are running excellently to support the ride-hailing business owners and is named as the uber clone. These applications are developed and designed in an optimum way to provide the best support for running the taxi business efficiently.
While Uber has been in news for its continuous controversies raised among the employers, employees and even among the passengers, Lyft has kept its track record clear. With Uber being involved in the allegations of sexual harassment and theft of passenger and driver's data, Lyft has suffered a lot less than Uber. However, Lyft has been alleged as their employees making use of the data to track their romantic partners and some business giants (Mark Zuckerberg), Lyft has immediately put forward the actions and has limited the access to private data of customers for the employees.
However, the consequences for Uber's controversies led to the resignation of their CEO, Travis Kalanick (Also a co-founder) and new CEO Dara Khosrowshahi has taken his place and has been trying to handle the operations well.
Uber has included a noteworthy feature of requesting a special ride for children, aged or a ride with wheel-chair. With its services being popular among the passengers for a long time, Uber has earned the benefit of owning more drivers facilitating the advanced accessibility enabled rides and hence Uber holds the hand higher here. While Lyft offering similar facility cannot guarantee that drivers will be available everywhere, as they have limited support for it.
Uber and Lyft have changed with time and are constantly updating their applications with interactive and useful features to support the changing requirements of passengers. Therefore, to support the outing in groups, they have introduced a new feature named as Fare Split. Pressing the button of Fare Split simply lets the passenger get the amount that each of them has to pay by splitting the total fare accordingly. Therefore, sharing the fare has been made a lot easier. However, Lyft has promised an improved version of their application with changes in fare split feature and have discontinued it for a while.
In essence, both applications give each other pretty uphill competition but Uber wins with offering more usability through continuing certain features and also with its huge force of drivers, Uber is available everywhere, anytime the user demands and has always got them covered.
Uber and Lyft both follow the concept of dynamic pricing. Dynamic pricing is generally associated with the term "Surge Pricing" and these both do not hesitate to surge their prices during the increased demands. Dynamic pricing is the rise in ride fare when there is an increase in demand or during peak hours and when traffic is high. Hence, the base fare gets multiplied with the surge multiplier and that much fare has to be paid by the customers. Previously, Uber used to mark the duration when the surge pricing was implemented and also showed the surged price which is no longer available now.
On the other hand, Lyft remains pretty transparent in this case. Lyft calls it as the prime time and also indicates the surged value in percentage to let the passengers know what additional prices they are paying here. Also, the receipt of received payment provided by Lyft is more transparent compared to Uber's, as Lyft prefers to mention the distance traveled, the time taken for traveling and also the surged price in it. And Uber avoids such minimal details which announce Lyft to be the winner with its more transparent and clear pricing policies and payment receipts.
However, the final decision is required to be taken from the perspective of the individual. Here the major factors and the comparison of these ride-hailing Goliaths are mentioned and the ultimate winner in the race of gaining more passengers remains Uber. With its widespread over the world and serving the passengers in more countries, Uber raises the bar for Lyft which still serves in the United States and Canada and still has a limited base of passengers.
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