When are Lyft and Uber going to add a “refund” button within their app?

It would leave too much room for fraudulent or abusive behavior. Would exponentially increase the time their claims/customer service team has to spend digging through refunds to sort the real ones from the bs.

As a bad customer: I don't like the drivers name - refund. I thought the driver was too slow - refund. I just want to see what I can get away with - refund.

Believe it or not, most people will exploit systems to the fullest extent.

> Drivers calling me to ask to cancel the ride

Tell them to cancel it if they want it cancelled!

Uber actually already does this on occasion. Request a refund from My Trips > Trip > I would like a refund. Depending on your reasoning, and the details of the trip, it may issue a refund automatically.

For a cancellation fee, I’ve definitely gotten an automatically issued refund in the past.

Disclosure: I work at Uber.

This is my biggest complaint with these apps as well, its a terrible experience and I'm surprised they haven't hashed it out yet. Generally I call the driver and tell them I won't cancel and sometimes it works. If it doesn't then I open up the other app and hope it doesn't happen again.

Good middle-ground:

After matching with driver:

Wait 4 minutes.

if distance from driver >= initial distance from driver:

Pop up modal asks if you would like a refund, to be matched with a different driver, or to wait.

I have requested a refund because a driver asked me to cancel from the app. I'm on iOS but if you go Your Trips -> Find it -> I would like a refund. I was refunded in a very short amount of time from what I remember. edit: This is from the Uber app, not sure about Lyft.

If uber charges you $5 and makes you spend an hour to reverse it, no one reverses it. Those $5 add up.

This isn't just a $5 issue. My friend had a driver start a ride without her in the car, and then kept it going as they drove multiple hours to the tune of $650. The whole time we were trying to stop it but there was no option. Months of tweeting and emailing and calling later, they weren't budging. It wasn't until I started a Reddit thread asking why Lyft allows drivers to scam riders that they finally relented and refunded the money. Customer service!

The cancel->refund pattern falls under the umbrella of a dispute. Drivers don't want to drive 10 mins toward a rider and then see them cancel on a whim with no consequence. In a case like that, the rider made a commitment that they would pay some money, which would ultimately offset the cost of the driver driving to the pick up spot, so the driver would want things to be made right if the rider decided to cancel.

Determining who is right in each case requires human intervention. Human intervention costs money. In some cities, it costs A LOT of money. Someone has to pay for it. One solution would be to hide that cost in the price of all rides, but no company is going to do that if it means having higher prices than competitors across the board.

If it was more common that a driver is at fault in a cancellation than a rider, the default behavior of the app would logically be to refund. The fact that it is not tells you something about the incentives for all the parties involved and where the potentials for abuse lie.

Ola (similar to Uber/Lyft in India) have refund button and it works pretty well. One time I booked a ride and the driver cancelled it after 20 minutes because of traffic, but I got charged for that. The Ola app had refund option and I choose the reason "The driver cancelled the ride" and I got the money back (to Ola wallet).

They intentionally charge you the $5 because they are assholes who like to commit fraud. Dispute it with the credit card company. Don't even bother with Uber. Go straight to your credit card website and put a dispute on it as soon as it comes out of pending. I have not seen the fee with Lyft myself, but Uber's charging of fees is absolutely ridiculous. They claim to charge a fee after you've been waiting for a few minutes if you cancel, despite the fact that the only reason you've been waiting long enough to trigger the fee is because they are a bunch of fuckwads who can't provide decent service within a reasonable amount of time. The fee is fraud and you should treat it as such. As far as I can tell, the credit card companies do not even contact Uber anymore, they immediately refund you the money because they know it's fraud. Oh, and write your representatives, if you think that will make a difference--it won't.

This thread has 36 points and 26 comments in 40 minutes, but it's halfway down the second page somehow. Shouldn't this be on the front page? Is this being demoted by the mods for some reason?

EDIT: The thread was flagged apparently. For what?

They do, go to trips, report a problem, request a refund or something.