Uber Looking to Lure Veteran Drivers Back With Guaranteed Earnings!

If you’re a veteran driver who hasn’t been driving for Uber in a while, you may have gotten a nice little offer that Uber is offering to some drivers in some markets. In this video and article I’m going to provide you with some of the details that we got in three markets.

And stick around, because at the end of the video I’m going to share with you whether I think it’s worth it and whether I think this approach by Uber to lure drivers back into the Uber fold is going to work.

Take a look at the video below, and scroll to see the video transcript.

An earnings guarantee for lapsed drivers?

Now, I haven’t driven for Uber in a while, and I did not get this offer, but we do have offers from Los Angeles, Seattle and San Francisco that we’re going to share with you so you know what’s going on. You might get this offer, so we’re going to analyze it and see if it’s actually worthwhile, and whether we think it’s going to work.

The first thing we get need to make the distinction of is between a bonus and a guarantee. What Uber is offering to veteran drivers and what they offer to all new drivers now is not a bonus. It’s a guarantee. Let’s actually take a look at what Uber is currently offering in San Francisco.

The promotion is an earnings guarantee, not a bonus

What you can see here is they are offering $525 guaranteed if you take 100 trips. Basically they’re guaranteeing you $5.25 per ride for your first 100 trips. If you did drive a hundred trips, and let’s say you only earned $400, then you would get the difference in a bonus, which would be $125.

We can see here what Lyft is offering in San Francisco, a guarantee of $2,100 if you do 235 rides, so they’re offering a little bit more per ride. It comes out to almost $9 per ride.

But you have to do all those rides in the first 30 days. The important point is to understand the difference. They are not giving you a bonus of $2,100. Instead, they’re just giving you a guarantee and if you make less than the guarantee, then you get a bonus as the difference. But if you go out and you do all those rides for Lyft and you make $3,000 which is over the guarantee, you get zip, nada, zilch.

What Uber has offered some drivers in LA, Seattle, and SF

Hey you veteran drivers, take a look at this! This first one we’re looking at is in Los Angeles and you can see the guarantee is for $500 for 50 trips. That’s basically $10 per ride.

The next one we’re going to look at is in Seattle where it’s $600 for 50 trips. So we’re seeing there a $12 a guarantee per trip as long as you do your 50 trips.

Let’s take a look at what drivers are being offered in San Francisco. What you see on the screen now is $600 guaranteed for 50 trips. That is $12 per trip. What I did is I pulled my earnings for the last week, and what we see here is that just in right earnings, I made $964 and I did 82 trips. Of course I did 82 trips because that’s where I earn a bonus on top of that $962 but if we take the $962 and divide it by 82, we can see that my average per ride earnings are just about $12. So when I do my normal driving, I’m earning about $12 per ride.

Uber is guaranteeing me $12 per ride. So I have to say it’s not that attractive, it’s just what I normally do. So why would that lure me over to Uber? Well, there’s some ways that you can manipulate your ride.

The short ride strategy could work well here

A few years ago, The Rideshare Guy published an article about the short ride strategies, and there’s basically two components to it.

The first one is you only accept Uber pools, so of course an new Uber pool is when you take a trip and during that trip you’re going to have multiple passengers, so you may take a trip where you earn $12 for example, but you had three passengers, so that means each passenger is worth about $4, so if you could earn $4 per passenger and you’re guaranteed $12, that means you’re going to get an extra $8 with the guarantee. The others part of the strategy is that you can drive in areas where the rides are short.

For example, here in the Bay area, I know if I go to a college campus such as UC Berkeley, I’m going to get a lot of shorter rides. It’s going to be students going to class, students leaving the campus and going to their dorms and to their apartments, people going to go work out. Typically the rides are shorter. So when you combine shorter rides with Uber pool rides, then you’re going to get a lot of smaller, shorter rides.

The variable that concerns me is how long do you have to wait to get those Uber pools? I haven’t done an analysis of this, but I would say that one out of four of my ride pings are for Pool or Lyft shared. They’re not that common. You might have to spend a lot of time waiting around. Is that worth it? It’s really your call because everyone’s got a different situation.

Over half of drivers quit after 6 months. Uber & Lyft are trying to retain us

What are the key takeaways here? It’s an interesting approach. Over half the people who drive for Uber and Lyft quit after six months. There’s this enormous pool of people out there that have driven for Uber and Lyft. They have a car that’s been approved, so it makes sense for Uber to go and try and get them.

But is $12 a ride or $10 a ride guarantee enough to get somebody to change their behavior? For me, no, it’s not enough. I would need to see about $20 a ride guarantee for me to say, okay, I’m going to go drive for Uber. I’m going to go knock out 50 rides for Uber, but your situation may be different. You may see this as good money and a good opportunity to go out, work for a couple of days. That’s all it would take to get about 50 rides if you worked full days and get at least that amount of money. It’s your call.

I want to say thanks a lot for watching. If you like the video, give it a thumbs up. Go out and have a great day!