5 Uber Driver App Features You Need to Know About

The Uber Driver app is just an amazing piece of technology! It’s remarkable. I’m going to share with you five lesser-known app features that I find very valuable. And stick around because I’m going to share with you my number one tool that I like to use particularly during the Uber Pool rides.

Take a look at the video below, then scroll to read the transcript.

Speed Up Your Pickups With Messages

About half the time when I go to pick up a passenger, they are not toes on the sidewalk. They are not there ready to go. Sometimes there’s some latency with the app so they think you’re still a couple blocks away. Uber’s got this really nice little feature where you can just send them a pre typed message.

All you need to do is tap on the little phone icon and then these little messages pop up. And the one I click is “I have arrived.” And then you can see in the third screenshot, it’s like we’re having a chat. And sometimes the passenger will get back in touch with me and say, “I’m on my way.” But regardless, you’re letting them know a couple of things. One, you’re letting them know that you’re there. And two, you want to let them know that you want them to get out and meet with you so that they can avoid a cancellation fee. So it serves a lot of purposes.

Boost Your Profile

You’ve got this profile, and when I’m a passenger, I always like to check out the profile of the driver. And a lot of passengers do too. They may not even say anything, but they look at it and you can edit it to kind of market yourself a little bit.

You just click on your little face in the upper right hand corner and then you click on the second screenshot you see, you click where it says platinum, you see it says profile there and then that opens it up. As you can see here it says Nomad Jay and then I’ve got my website. You can put your website there and if somebody is interested in a conversation you’ve had, they can then go and check out your website and you can edit it to include all kinds of things.

For example, it says, I know English, I’m from Northern California. You can put your hometown, it shows how many trips and how long have you been doing it and some of your stats. But the main thing I’m suggesting there is where you can put a little bit of information about yourself. Put something, if you have something to sell, some service to offer, that’s a great place to boost your profile.

Use “Final Ride” More Often

Number three is use the Final Ride feature more often. I use it a lot. You’re going to use it when you’re ready to take a break or when you’re ready to end your shift. You’re basically telling Uber and Lyft, I don’t want any more rides after this particular ride.

Down at the bottom of the app screen you’ll see three little lines, that’s what you’re going to click. And that opens up what’s called the Trip Planner. And then at the bottom center you see the red hand, the red circle with the white hand. You tap on that and then you’ll see in the third screen it says request stopped.

Then if you wanted to, let’s say you just change your mind, you just press on that again and it goes back to being red. Let’s say I’ve taken a long trip down, for example, to San Jose and I don’t want to do any rides in San Jose unless they’re heading back towards San Francisco. So I will set that to my last ride. That way I can stop, I can maybe go get a coffee. Then I can set my destination filter to head back and that way I won’t get any rides that I’m going to have to cancel on because I don’t want to do any rides specifically down in San Jose.

Changing Destination Mid Trip

This happened just the last week where I was taking an older couple to the airport and the guy, halfway there, forgot his laptop and we had to turn around and he didn’t know how to change the destination and I didn’t remember where exactly we were going. So I had to do it myself.

The way you do that is you tap on the address. Where it says right there, it says Folsom Street. And then once that opens up, you see where the circle is. There’s a little pencil, that’s to edit it. So you click on that and then that opens up the third screen shot there. You see where you can type in the address and you hit return and you’re on your way and then you can hit navigate and it’ll take you there. So if your passenger doesn’t know how to do that, that’s how you do it. And it’s a very useful tool so that you can help your passenger and just avoid a lot of confusion.

Cancel Individual Passengers on Pool Trips

So this happens quite a bit when I’m going to the airport. I love my car, but it does not have a massive, massive trunk. If I have two people and they have significantly big pieces of luggage or two pieces each, I’m not going to have enough room for a third passenger. Or sometimes I might get two parties of twos. I get one party, but there’s two people and they’ve each got two pieces of luggage so I can’t take anyone else. So what happens then is you get a ping because Uber thinks you can still add one more person, but you don’t have any room.

You start off again by clicking on the Trip Planner. And then for that specific passenger, where those three little dots are, that’s where you’re going to click on that. And then you’ve got to give a reason why you’re canceling. You can just click on problem with the pickup route.

Down at the bottom it says none of the above. Click on any one of them. And that’ll open up the last screenshot where it says canceled trip. And that will cancel just that individual passenger so that you can continue on to the airport, and not have that passenger waiting, wondering what’s going on cause you’re continuing to drive to the airport.

I hope you found some value in those and you’ve got a few more little tricks up your sleeve now with the Uber app. Everybody, thanks for watching. This is Jay Cradeur with The Rideshare Guy. You all go out and have a great day.