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Comment by saimiam | Hacker News Reader

Wait till Uber (and others) launches a rewards points system. All they have to do is to give regular riders some multiple of their number of completed rides. People will willingly lock themselves inside the Uber World network to earn points. Leading the charge will be people like The Points Guy.

Then comes co-branded credit cards.

The endgame is to replicate the airline industry - 4-5 companies controlling everything.

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But where are the profits? Uber is already subsidizing rides, while cabs and cab companies have to turn profits. Trying to build loyalty with points just increases Uber's costs, as they can't push that off onto drivers. Retaining customers and increasing ridership by increasing loss per trip is not a sustainable model.

Ride services are completely different from airlines, if only because the capital outlay is incomparable. You could run a ride sharing business and get two hundred drivers driving around New York by December for 250k. That won't even pay for a single flight crew for a year, much less a plane to put them in.

Furthermore, pretty much by definition, pretty much all airline passengers are travelers. Some car hire users are travelers. Many are just people going out for drinks in their local city.

I assume the mix varies by locale.

I don't use taxis etc. a lot when I travel but if I did a single goto brand would be useful. Locally, if Bob's app was the best local taxi service, I don't really care if someone else operates in 500 cities worldwide. (Just like I don't care that the car service I use to get me to the airport covers only a slice of even my local area.)

Seems they're already replicating the airline industry by constantly losing money.

This. Airlines are not a favorable model. Airlines irrationally invest, deal with fuel costs they have to partially hedge, can't store capacity... the list goes on.

There is already some of this - some credit card companies have "save x percent on all your uber charges" or "every tenth uber ride is free" promotions.

Uber sort of already experimented a reward system, but limited to customers who own Captial One credit card, at least in my experience. See [1]. They stopped this but it was not a bad reward system when I was consistently using Uber for a while.

1: https://newsroom.uber.com/payment-rewards/

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