Hacker News Reader

Comment by jamesmishra | Hacker News Reader

Hey William, the reason Uber charges a cancellation fee is to compensate the driver for driving towards you.

Without cancellation fees, drivers would have to eat the cost of whatever progress they made towards you.

While the policy varies by city, typically an UberX or UberBLACK vehicle can be cancelled for free within 2 minutes.

UberPOOL rides typically get billed cancellations immediately, because the canceling rider may have also added to the ETA of an Uber rider already in the vehicle.

Uber will occasionally waive the cancellation fee when the ETA of a POOL pickup is significantly higher than the prediction given pre-booking.

If you believe you may be eligible for a refund, you can contact Uber support. Read more here: https://help.uber.com/h/24e75a3b-cf44-44e4-abae-8c2dce3b07a3

View on HN

> Hey William, the reason Uber charges a cancellation fee is to compensate the driver for driving towards you.

Sorta? So one of the last times I cancelled a ride the driver was 8 minutes away which, not ideal, was fine. The problem was the driver was sitting at a restaurant. After 15 minutes passed he was still 8 minutes away but occasionally his car icon would move a little here and there (but staying at the restaurant).

I cancelled and it charged me a cancellation fee. Fortunately, after talking to a few friends of mine, it seems no matter why you get the cancellation fee (your fault or not) they will immediately refund it with credits if you complain.

Pretty aggravating experience, however.

Hey Kris, I'm sorry to hear that you had a bad experience, but it sounds like you were able to get your situation resolved with the support team.

The situation you describe happens pretty rarely--Uber has done over five billion trips in seven years, and typically drivers are fairly intent on finding their rider quickly and delivering a five-star experience.

In the future, perhaps various improvements to the product can mitigate the situation you describe. For example, Uber uses accelerometer data from the driver phone to improve ride safety. https://eng.uber.com/telematics/

If you have any thoughts on further improving the Uber experience, feel free to reach out.

> The situation you describe happens pretty rarely

Statistically maybe but around in the East Bay I have this happen with an Uber or Lyft driver almost once a week. The time I mentioned was just more extreme than the others (typically I wait and they start moving after a few minutes).

>The situation you describe happens pretty rarely--

Can you put a number on that? It's anecdata but I feel like watching my friends request Ubers it's like 10% of requests. It's even worse at the airport. Adding extra padding time to account for failed requests is a fairly regular use pattern.

Are things so bad at Uber that they've decided putting a PR guy on HN is a worthwhile investment?

I don't work at Uber anymore, but I visited the office recently and things look pretty good! :)

I just really love the company. I only left because my best-friend-in-the-whole-wide-world and I wanted to start a startup.

Although if the startup doesn't take off... I'd definitely consider going back to Uber.

His profile says he is an ex-engineer.

If Uber matches a driver 10 minutes away to me when there are available drivers 3 minutes away and I cancel, it seems like Uber's fault for any distance that 10 minute away driver traveled needlessly.

> Without cancellation fees, drivers would have to eat the cost of whatever progress they made towards you.

No, without it, Uber would have to eat the cost of whatever progress drivers made towards the rider.

You tell the drivers to go somewhere (And punish them when they don't) - it's on Uber to pay them.

Hilarious that there's not even a consideration that glorious Uber eats the cost. It's just that the driver would have to - obviously, who else? At some point it stops being spin and becomes some kind of ideology.

Uber eats the cost every time you contact a support agent regarding your cancellation fee (assuming that your fee is indeed credited.) :)

Automatically taking responsibility for all cancellations--whether malicious or not--would be a vector for fraud and abuse.

Yeah, just imagine what would happen if a ride sharing company were the victim of massive cancellation abuse.

Uber has the analystics, driver ratings, customer ratings, and all that other data that it needs to deal with fraud, fraud, and bad actors.

The fact that they, by default, delegate this to the customer is incredibly shitty.

Sort of.

If you're a rider or driver with a couple hundred trips, we can be sure that you're legitimate... unless your account has been hacked. Uber accounts are especially valuable to hackers, so we can imagine some percentage of legitimate accounts are making illegitimate ride requests.

If you're a first-time driver, then Uber has done a background check and a vehicle inspection, but there aren't any rider ratings, accelerometer data, etc. yet.

If you're a first-time rider using https://m.uber.com/ to take a ride on a cash-payments enabled product... then there isn't a whole lot of data to go on.

You can read more about what Uber does to prevent fraud at https://eng.uber.com/tag/fraud/

If you have tons of cool thoughts on fraud engineering and are interested in implementing those thoughts on a world-class platform, you can find fraud engineering-related jobs at https://www.uber.com/careers/list/?city=all&country=all&keyw...

> Uber has the analystics, driver ratings, customer ratings, and all that other data that it needs to deal with fraud, fraud, and bad actors

You can have all the data in the world and still make bad decisions.

Sometimes it's cheaper to just pay the customer rather than hiring more engineers to work out a fraud detection algorithm.

I think Uber has realized this.

If they realized it, they shouldn't make the customer do a chargeback to get their money in the situations posted in this thread.

Any idea why I get charged $5 when my ride circles the block a few times and never actually comes to pick me up?

That's not true. I cancelled a ride less than 1 minute after I booked it and was charged the cancellation fee.

The email they sent me even confirms that. They must code their systems to still charge the fee even when they say they wont: http://imgur.com/a/JqTgT

Reply on news.ycombinator.com