Not everyone sees the same prices on Uber and Lyft, according to a new study.
The rideshare apps appear to price trips differently — even when riders request the same route at the same exact minute, a new investigation from Consumer Reports found.
The results, published Tuesday, show “that Uber and Lyft use AI to routinely charge different customers significantly different prices,” according to a summary of the report.
While some trip requests only resulted in a few different price offerings, others varied much more. In some cases, the differences between the highest and lowest price groups were 50%.
“One route in Kansas City, Missouri, generated 29 different prices for 55 potential customers for the same ride at the same time,” Consumer Reports said.
For the investigation, Consumer Reports virtually requested rides for 30 routes around the US. The publication also recruited volunteers to request rides at the same time in-person in Portland, Oregon.
Another test, conducted in the Phoenix area, saw prices for a ride on Uber range from $41.21 to $56.96 after accounting for discounts — a difference of about 38%. Consumer Reports observed the prices among 18 volunteers, each of whom requested the same ride at the same minute.
Dynamic pricing is becoming more common on purchases from Big Macs for delivery to clothing at Old Navy. Companies, including Uber and Lyft, have said that they change prices for goods and services based on supply and demand, like requesting a ride to the airport on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, for instance.
Consumer Reports said that its investigation controlled for differences in time and place by requesting rides on Uber and Lyft in the same place and at the same time, and prices still varied widely. That, the report reads, calls into question “whether the price differences observed are based only on market forces.”
Consumer Reports did not say what accounted for the differences in fares documented in its investigation. Uber and Lyft said that they use a variety of factors to price rides.
Lyft’s privacy policy gives some examples, Consumer Reports said: The company might infer riders’ gender based on their name or assume that they’re frequent travelers if they often request rides to or from an airport. Lyft said it doesn’t “group” customers together, and Uber said it doesn’t consider “protected characteristics,” such as race or disability.
Uber and Lyft challenged the findings in the report, saying that the tests might have inflated demand, according to Consumer Reports. Prices also change every second, making it “impossible” to compare fares, an Uber spokesperson told Consumer Reports.
“In an open, dynamic marketplace like ours, with nearly 1.7 million mobility and delivery trips per hour, a trip is defined just as much by when it is requested and what’s happening nearby as where it is going,” the spokesperson said.
Uber and Lyft did not respond to an additional request for comment from Business Insider.
Besides encountering a variety of prices, Consumer Reports also found that, about half of the time, Uber and Lyft offer customers what look like discounted ride fares, complete with lower prices replacing higher, struck-through ones and messages like “Fares lower than usual.”
About 11% of those discounts were based on what “appeared to be inflated original prices,” Consumer Reports found. Uber and Lyft said that the struck-out amounts weren’t discounts but reflected past prices for the rides. An Uber spokesperson called them “historical comparison messaging.”
“A reasonable consumer would conclude that those are discounts, regardless of the semantic distinction that Uber and Lyft claim,” said Derek Kravitz, an investigative reporter at Consumer Reports who wrote the report.
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