Most of us don’t think about ordering an Uber until roughly 10 minutes before we need an Uber, but that could change with the ridesharing service’s latest feature. Uber has announced that it is rolling out Scheduled Rides, which does exactly what you think: It allows users to schedule a pickup anywhere from 30 minutes to 30 days in advance.
In a blog post, Russell Dicker, a product head at Uber, wrote:
[W]e’ve heard from our riders that sometimes they want to arrange a pickup in advance so they can rest assured that an Uber will be available when they need it, even if it’s for a 4AM ride to the airport.
The global rollout of the service started on Thursday in Seattle, and Scheduled Rides will soon expand to other “top business travel cities,” although Uber has not revealed which cities it puts into the "top" category, nor has it released any specific dates. According to Dicker, priority access will be given to Uber for Business customers, as well as riders who have Business profiles.
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Scheduled Rides are only available through the app’s UberX offerings, and users will be able to set their preferred pickup time (in 15-minute increments), location and destination. Uber will send one reminder 24 hours in advance, and a second one 30 minutes before pickup. Riders will be able to change their location information —or cancel the ride altogether — until 30 minutes before the scheduled pickup time.
Although Uber will provide a fare estimate at the time the ride is scheduled, this isn’t a way to completely avoid its dreaded surge pricing; when a driver is dispatched, Uber will send an alert, which also lets riders know whether surge pricing is in effect. According to Wired, riders will then have five minutes to either accept the surge price or to cancel without penalty (and then scramble to call a cab).
If some of those sentences sound familiar, it could be because Lyft announced its own ride scheduling feature almost three weeks ago. In a blog post called “Introducing Scheduled Rides” (which also features a hypothetical early a.m. ride to the airport) Lyft said that it would begin testing scheduled rides in San Francisco before potentially offering the service to riders in other cities.
The biggest difference between Lyft’s Scheduled Rides and Uber’s Scheduled Rides is that Lyft’s options are still more short-term: Riders can currently only schedule rides between 30 minutes and 24 hours in advance.
