Uber Hides UberPool Surge Pricing from Passengers
Uber notifies passengers of surge pricing with a small symbol next to the service. For UberPool, there isn’t usually a surge symbol on it, so customers may think that there isn’t surge pricing. I noticed this on the passenger app, and below is a screenshot to show this issue:
On the driver side, you are notified that it is an UberPool trip and if it has surge pricing. However, the passengers only sees the final price and doesn’t see the surge multiple. Either way, there is a little bit of guess work involved. With uberX, you see the multiplier, but you may not know what the ride costs. With UberPool, you don’t know the rate, but you know what the final price is. Passengers will need to be a bit more diligent to check out what the surge pricing is and not blindly request UberPool because it doesn’t have surge pricing. Just keep in mind that if UberX is surging, so is UberPool. Passengers can use the multiplier for UberX to see what the UberPool surge pricing is since surge pricing is the same between UberPool, UberX and UberXL.
Here are some screenshots of the UberPool rates at 1.8x, 1.5x and 1.3x surge on UberX to show that there is surge pricing on UberPool trips:
I claim that Uber hides surge pricing because passengers only see the final price. They may not know what the ride costs without surge pricing nor is there a warning that their trip has surge pricing in it.
UberPool Pricing
Also, an additional seat costs more so if you are traveling alone, you get a small discount (of about $1, almost regardless of distance). It may be worth a $1 just to have an extra seat in the car.
From the above estimates and the real UberPool prices, you can see that you don’t necessarily that much on shorter trips. In the above example, you save at most $2 on a $9 trip, which amounts to about 22% savings.
On longer trips the savings can be substantial, up to $14 off of a potentially a $29 trip, which is about 50%:
The estimate takes into account traffic so if there is heavy traffic along the way, it may make sense to do UberPool for longer trips. However, keep in mind that there may be passengers along the way and UberPool routing is often not an efficient way for some passengers. Build in some extra time in case you get extra passengers in your car. I have seen requests go about 10 minutes out of the way and the driver is often notified too late to make it convenient for the passengers in the car.
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