Is Lyft’s Weekly Ride Challenge Living Up To The Hype?

Now that Lyft’s weekly ride challenge bonus has been around for awhile, is it living up to the hype? And how has it changed over the months? Jay Cradeur shares his own experience with weekly ride challenges. Is it reason enough to switch over to Uber?

Take a look at Jay’s video, and scroll to the video transcript to see the points he covers. This video is a year old now, but I think it still provides a solid analysis about declining Lyft bonuses.

Hey everybody, this is Jay Cradeur with The Rideshare Guy, coming to you from Bogota, Columbia. Don’t worry, I’ll show you just a few quick pics at the end of the video so you can see how beautiful and amazing this city is and how grateful I am to be a driver, because we can work when we want and take off and enjoy the world when we want.

The Lyft Weekly Ride Challenge replaced the Power Driver Bonus

Just to back up a little bit, prior to this we had what was called the Power Driver Bonus. In San Francisco, the peak PWB I got was $500, but you had certain acceptance rate and you also had peak hours in which you had to drive. Then they came out with this new bonus, which eliminated the peak hour requirements and eliminated the acceptance rate requirement, and they only dropped it from $500 down to $423.

Lyft bonus payouts are dropping!

At that time I wrote a blog post. It made a video that said, yes, this is awesome, but there’ve been two significant, actually three significant changes that have occurred since then. So let’s break them down. The first is that you can no longer make $423. My amount has now dropped down to $356. Here you can see a few pay statements. When the bonus first came out, $423 was the top, and then approximately a month later it dropped down to $356. I can only hope that’s the end of the drops, but disappointing to see that Lyft kind of teased us with a high rate and then dropped it after a few weeks.

The second change is that now instead of being able to get three different payouts throughout the week, now you can only get two, and the first payout you have to get all the way up to 140 trips to get that first payout. Here you can see the original payout in September where you could get paid out three different times at 82 trips, and then after 58 more trips and then at 25 trips, and they were spread out nice. $143, $130, $150.

Now this is where I am this week, where there’s only two payouts and the first payout is at a whopping 140 trips to get $230, and then you’ve got to do another 25 get $126, so they’ve kind of back ended it. Again, big disappointment. It was sure nice having those three payouts with a full bonus at $423, now we’re at two payouts for $356.

Now, the third major change is that Uber has Uber Pro, which has made Uber a much more attractive company all of a sudden. For drivers that qualify at their highest level, which is called Diamond, you can get a 6% increase in your revenue.  (Update: Uber got ride of the 6% increase!) You can also get a 5% decrease in your gas expense. You can also get time and distance on rides so you can determine if a ride is a ride you want to take or not, so you can cancel if it doesn’t work for you. And what else? You can also get free tuition at Arizona State University. These are some pretty remarkable things that are being offered. When you consider that the Lyft bonus has been, we kind of got bait and switched there. We got told here’s what it is, but now it’s been switched a few times now to its current state, and Uber is on the upswing with their new program. It makes you think.

In just a few minutes I’m going to share with you what I think, but first let me show you a couple pictures from Bogota, Columbia. I’ve traveled quite a bit. This is a common scene going through customs. There’s a lot of people. It actually only took 35 minutes, which believe me is not bad. This is my first street food. This is called arepa de huevo. That’s egg inside of a roll, it’s really good, and then they’ve got a bunch of sauces and they drink different flavored fruit juices. That’s the view from my room. It was so beautiful with the sun setting over the mountain and the sky. Pretty great.

To summarize this video. What I want to say is that even though Lyft has shown a lot of drops, I’m still going to stick with Lyft at least until the Uber Pro comes to my market. At that point, I’m really going to have to make a hard choice, but for the time being, even though I can make a little bit less money driving for Lyft, I still prefer the Lyft app over the Uber app, and I like that I don’t have to worry about the peak hours, and I just like the Lyft customers. The passengers seem to be a little more friendly, a little more gregarious than the Uber. All those things still tip me over to Lyft.

Hey, thanks for watching. This is Jay Cradeur saying have a great day out there. Be safe.