Taxi aggregating app UBER, which is often regarded as one of the most controversial companies in the world due to some of its business practices like surge pricing has decided to make its app simpler by not providing notifications with respect to surge pricing to customers and according to the company, it feels that this move would make the app less complicated. UBER's surge pricing notifications inform a user that they might need to pay 1.5 times or 2.3 times the normal fare and the whole thing often gets a bit complicated, which is why the comany is not going to do away with surge pricing notifications. UBER has alread introduced this in the United States and India, since April of this year and now the company wishes to take it to more cities.
UBER announced the development in a blog post, "Imagine buying an airline ticket without knowing the full fare until the end of your trip. Or booking a hotel room online and being told that the real price would be 1.3X. Yes, that sounds odd-but it's what happens with many Uber trips today. We moved to upfront, per trip fares-just like airlines and hotels-two years ago when we launched uberPOOL. Riders needed to enter their destinations so we could match them with other people headed the same way. This allowed us to calculate the actual fare in advance and show it to riders before they booked their ride. Knowing how much a ride will cost in advance is clearly something riders appreciate: today uberPOOL accounts for over 20 percent of all rides globally. And we now want more riders globally to benefit from this feature."
Jim Clark, who is a director at Econsultancy told BBC, "There is the argument that it becomes quicker and easier to see the price.But I think that's an argument only Uber might make rather than anybody else." He added, "From a business perspective, it makes sense - it encourages people to use the service.But it's important to give users a choice of whether to wait - being given all the information is the spirit of the sharing economy. At the very least they could give users the option to switch the surge information on or off."
