Lyft weekly guarantees are a waste of time

One of the things I do to augment my income as a freelance web developer is drive for Uber and Lyft. Oddly enough, it works out well. When I don’t have anything to do for a client, I go out and drive strangers around in my car. It helps pay the bills. One of the things that annoy me is Lyft weekly guarantees.

Because Lyft, or as I like to call them, Fake Uber, doesn’t have enough drivers in Western Maryland, they’ve been running Lyft weekly guarantees, promotions to get people like me to drive more. Last week they guaranteed $200 if you drove at least 20 riders and had a 90 percent acceptance rate. That means you accepted at least nine out of every ten ride requests.

Because I made more than $200 last week driving for Lyft, the promotion didn’t kick in for me.

This week, Lyft has been running a similar promotion. Drive at least 25 rides and maintain a 90 percent acceptance rate and you are guaranteed $270.

I’ve been trying to meet that goal. Normally I log into both Uber and Lyft and take the first request I get and then go offline on the other rideshare service. This week, I haven’t even been logging into Uber. I’ve been driving for Lyft the entire time.

As of this afternoon, I have 27 rides for the week, but my acceptance rate is only 87 percent. That’s three percent below what I need for the $270 promotion.

This makes no sense. I’ve only declined two (2) requests this entire week. One was a passenger I already drove that day. He was both rude and he smelled bad. The other was a passenger who’s ride was going to take longer than 45 minutes. Both Uber and Lyft tell you when a rider needs to go somewhere far away. That almost always means they need a ride to Baltimore or Washington DC. When you’re participating in a promotion like this, it doesn’t behoove you to go on long trips. You want short trips. You want the kind of trips you can do a lot of in a day.

This week I’ve been offered 29 trips and I’ve accepted 27 of them. That works out to be over 92 percent. The problem is Lyft is showing that my acceptance rate is at 87%. I tried emailing them and it was a complete waste of time. This was their response:

Welcome to Lyft Support, as I understand the importance of having clear information and your Acceptance Rate inquiry deserves real attention and accurate solutions, let me be the one who can fix it for you.

Richard, I would love to help you change your Acceptance Rate, however, we are not allowed to do so due to Lyft policies. Therefore, I would recommend you to keep driving and providing amazing ride experiences!

I didn’t ask to have my acceptance rate changed. I asked how they determined my acceptance rate was 87 percent when basic math shows it should be over 92 percent.

It’s a lesson learned. From now on, I know to ignore Lyft weekly guarantees. If you satisfy their requirements for the incentive, they’ll just monkey with the numbers so you magically don’t qualify. There’s a hard record of the number of drives, but there is no hard record showing how many ride requests they’ve sent you. They can simply manipulate that as they see fit so it comes out in their favor.

Your Lyft acceptance rate is whatever Lyft wants it to be.

Update

I only drive Monday through Friday, so my week with Lyft is officially over. I finished the week with 31 rides with an acceptance rate of 89%. I earned $256.78. My guess is that if I earned $14 more, my acceptance rate would have magically shot up to 90%, qualifying me for the guaranteed $270. If I earned $14 more, I would have earned more than the guaranteed $270.

From now on, I’m not going to worry about the Lyft weekly guarantees. I’ll just drive and let what happens, happen.

6 thoughts on “Lyft weekly guarantees are a waste of time”

  1. Monique Garrett

    This is SO TRUE they play around with that acceptance rate for sure!!! They even had me miss a ride when one never came through on my phone on purpose. I figured exactly what you were saying out as well

  2. I’m so sorry to hear you didn’t have a good experience with your weekly incentive. I live in a orange county CA. I’m new driver and Lyft gave me a weekly incentive of 10 rides for $265.00. I had signed up a month before, but hadn’t driven yet because I had stage fright. I waited until Sunday at 1:59pm before I took my first ride, and I had 10 rides by 10:05pm. I took a couple of breaks to eat and play catch with my dog, and had to wait a while between rides a couple of times. I made $284 at the end of the night with my incentive. That’s $28.4 per ride or around $40 hour. I couldn’t believe they gave me the same incentive this week! Some of my rides were less than a mile long and less than a mile from my house. It’s a pretty sweet deal for me right now.

    1. Yeah I don’t doubt what this guy says, and if it happened to me I would be super pissed. That said, I got a 120$ 5 ride gaurentee when I started and completed it with only making 32$, so they ended up giving me a ton of money and my acceptance rate is still at 100%. Though they frequently will send me 20-25 minutes away for a 3$ ride so without the gaurntee thing I would be screwed money wise.

  3. I have not had any trouble making their incentive work for me. The last 2 weeks, the incentive has been a weekly guarantee of $325 for 30 rides / driving at least 20 hours / and keeping acceptance rate @ or above 90%.

    1st week I did 30 rides / little over 20 hours / acceptance rate of 100%. I drove Tuesday-Friday hit my quota for the bonus, and stopped driving for the week. I made $210 in eligible earnings and Lyft added $115 to my deposit. There were also tips on there of something like $30 or $40 (which Lyft doesn’t use in eligible earnings). The total deposit was $349.81. Lyft basically paid me to not drive for 8 hours as that’s how long it would have taken me to make that free $115.

  4. This weekend I drove 20 rides, and made $70, I am guaranteed $155, so Lyft is going to cover the $80. The weekly guarantees do work if you know where to do the shorter drives at.

    I always have at least 96% acceptance rate mainly from not accepting the 45+ min rides sometimes.

    Also, if you rate Passengers 3 starts or less you will not be paired with them again, so if you would have done that with the rude and smelly person you would have hit your acceptance rate.

  5. Sarge of San Diego

    I didn’t look at the publish date but thanks so much for putting awareness up I’ve only been driving for Uber and Lyft for about 5 months maybe six now and have noticed anyways I just got ping let me send this out you’re doing a great work helping us out with your experience with Uber and Lyft

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