Why the new Lyft City-Based Facebook Lounges Suck
I hope everyone had a nice Thanksgiving break last week. Luckily, not much happened in the rideshare world in the last week, save for some nice additions to the Lyft app, such as being able to see a running tab of your fares for the day and also the addition of putting in your destination in driver mode so you only get ride requests on your way back, very similar to what Sidecar does.
Well last week, Lyft also decided to kill off the regional lounges. There were a few issues with the regional lounge to begin with, which I brought up when they came into effect about five months ago:
- Complaints get amplified
- Many drivers’ voices gets silenced because there are so many posts by everyone
- Hard to discuss things with just your own city drivers
Over the past few months, hundreds of smaller Facebook groups started to replace the old official Lyft city-based lounges. There was a bit more freedom in these lounges to discuss what we liked, such as Uber and other opportunities. In many of the lounges, there wasn’t any poaching between the two services but just discussions about competition from Uber or regulations that would effect Lyft and Uber.
Lyft announced last week that they were doing away from the Regional lounges and implement smaller city based lounges. This time, instead of being invited based on your Facebook account, you had to go into your driver portal and opt in from your settings page:
Lack of Participation in the Lyft Lounge
In a few of the cities, these lounges didn’t fill up to anywhere near the original levels. I can show you why:
See below for now various different rooms inside of the Lyft Lounge:
You can see this driver lounge has 12 people in it and the others only have a few. I can see the point of a few of these lounges, like Drivers, Street-Team, and Driver Socials, but being that it is a city lounge, even Driver Socials can be implemented inside of the Driver lounge. I am not sure why they need to create so many different mini-rooms. Just two or three would be fine.
Another reason I think these city based lounges aren’t gaining any traction because so many drivers are already in the city based lounges that are controlled by drivers. We have a bit more freedom to discuss what we want without the constant fear that Lyft HQ would come in and delete the post. Some locally based Lyft Lounges have as many as 1000 drivers in them and I don’t think many drivers see the point in joining the official Lyft lounges.
Also, there are some drivers who can’t get into the official Lyft Lounges because of the way they signed up so they join the independent Lyft Lounge. About half of my recruits signed up with only their phone number or email so they wouldn’t have access to the official Lyft Lounges.
I think Lyft really messed up when they went to the Regional Lounges about six months ago. They could have made the Regional lounges without deleting the city-based lounges. When they deleted the city-based lounges, many drivers just decided to make their own. Now they seem to make the situation worst by having city based lounges but somehow put them into about 10 different segments. Lounges only work when there is a certain level of members and participation in them. Without, it’ll never work.
What do you think about the new Official Lyft City-based Lounge? Did you sign up for it? How active are they in your city?
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