What To Do When Your Uber Charge Is Higher Than Expected

One of the things I love about Uber is knowing the price of the ride when you ask for a car. You can make an informed decision about which type of car to request, see if you are paying extra because of demand, and not be subject to a meter like a taxi.

From Uber’s website:

In most cities, riders are offered an upfront price. Many data points go into calculating an upfront price, including the estimated trip time, distance from origin to destination, time of day, route, and demand patterns. It also includes tolls, taxes, surcharges, and fees (with the exception of wait time fees).

For this section, I’m paraphrasing Uber’s help site. For the exact wording, please go to Uber.com.

When you request a ride, you agree to be charged the upfront fare when the trip ends. Of course, the price can change, but according to Uber, that only happens rarely under the following conditions:

The upfront price you’re shown may change due to a number of circumstances, which may include adding stops, updating your destination, significant changes to the route or duration of the trip, or you pass through a toll that was not factored into your upfront price. In addition, you may incur wait time fees for the time you take to get to the car at the pickup or multi-stop fees for time spent at an on-trip stop.

If an upfront price is not honored, you will either be charged the minimum price or a price based on your trip’s measured time and distance, including any base rate, booking fee, surcharges, tolls, and other relevant factors such as a dynamic pricing charge.

In summary, Uber has the right to charge you a different amount based on the actual ride you were on if it’s different than the trip they based your fare estimate on.

I always check my Uber receipts. There are just too many Uber scams out there not to be vigilant. It’s an easy thing to do because I get an email before walking from the car into a building.

On a past trip, I was surprised when the receipt for a ride from our hotel in Las Vegas to the airport was $43.50.

The reason for my surprise was that the original quote for the ride was $22.32.

When I looked into this some more, it appeared that our driver took a much longer route to the airport than the Uber app suggested. He did ask when our flight was leaving when he picked us up, but we left with plenty of time to spare.

Here’s the shortest route from Google Maps. Distance: 3.8 miles.

Here’s the route our driver took. Distance: 11.8 miles.

He might have thought he was doing us a favor and avoiding the traffic at 8 a.m. on a Monday. I’m not sure. I know it made a big difference in the fare. After receiving this email, I was shocked. What could I do?

I did some searching and found that drivers might not even know that driving a different route will change the fare the passengers are paying. I’d hope my driver for this ride would know, as he’d been driving for 1.5 years and had over 1500 five-star rides.

Fortunately, it’s easy to tell Uber if this happens to you. The first thing to do is to open the Uber app. Then, you’ll need to pull up the menu by clicking on the Account tab at the bottom of the screen.

Tapping the help button will pull up the help menu. By default, it shows your most recent trip.

Swipe up until you see the menus at the bottom of the page.

Here’s where you select the trip where you feel you were overcharged.

The help desk works like an online chat. For my situation, I chose, “My driver took a poor route.”

That was it. It submitted my request, and Uber said they would get back to me. By the time we landed, I had an email saying that my charge was adjusted to the initially quoted fare. Uber knows the rate they quoted you and the route and can check that against the driver’s route.

I plead with you to only use this if you feel the driver unnecessarily took a different route. If you had to sit in traffic and Uber charges you a few dollars more, that’s fair. You’d have to do the same if you took a taxi. In my case, this fare was almost double what UBER promised me, and the driver didn’t make any mention that taking the freeway would cost us any more.

Although I haven’t experienced this issue in years, it is still prevalent and can be easily found online. I’ve also seen comments from riders where Uber will grant your first request as a courtesy but will reject subsequent requests if you often report being overcharged.

FINAL THOUGHTS

This was the first time I’d ever had a problem with an Uber, but it wasn’t the last.  This goes to show that you should always check the receipt you get after your ride. If there’s an honest difference, Uber makes it a painless process to report discrepancies, and I’ve found they try to rectify the situation.

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