April 4, 2017

Journey of Lyft and its future endeavors

By Vigneswaran S Uncategorized 0 Comments

Lyft, one of the transportation network giants operates in 300 cities across the United States of America. The company develops, operates, and markets its own software application. This application will allow the customers to book the car transportation via the Lyft app. In addition to the ride-hailing service, Lyft also delivers food to the customers; it is the kind of the on-demand food delivery service. People have the possibility to rent their own car to drive with Lyft, or they can drive their own car.

Journey of Lyft and its future endeavors

Lyft is building up trust among its users, all the drivers who wish to be part of Lyft, has to undergo the following screening process.

Sex offender registries in the United States and the Department of Motor Vehicles will check and verify the personnel and criminal background of the persons who have applied for the driver positions. The criminal background checking will check from the past seven years and it includes the national-level databases and the national sex offender registries.
The company will conduct the personal interviews with the current Lyft drivers.
The person should have completed 21 years or above. And they should hold the driver’s license for more than a year.
The person should not consume alcohol at any cost and he should have zero-tolerance alcohol and drug policy.

At the end of the journey, both the drivers and the riders are given an opportunity to rate each other. The company will look for the drivers with the good ratings. And on the rider’s side, it is important to have good ratings because, most of the drivers will select the rider with the good ratings, with this, the driver will understand that the particular rider will treat him well. If the rider has poor ratings, he will be avoided by most of the drivers, because they will come to a conclusion that the rider will not behave well throughout the journey.

Any driver who maintains the average of low ratings from the users will be taken off from the service by the company.

Same as Uber, Lyft classifies its drivers as the independent contractors, not as employees. But the company insures each driver with a $1 million commercial liability that will be essential to the personal policy of the driver.

Additional insurance coverage of the driver includes:

The company will offer the contingent comprehensive and the collision coverage up to $50,000 and $2,500 will be the deductible amount.
Lyft will provide the contingent liability insurance coverage up to $50,000 per head, $100,000 per accident, and $25,000 per property damage.
The company also offers the underinsured or uninsured insurance coverage up to $1 million

Uber vs. Lyft: the ride-sharing giants

Within just the couple of years, Lyft and Uber have grown as the two strongest brands in the ridesharing industry. Both the companies are expanding their services in order to enhance their business. This is one of the adequate strategies in the highly competitive TNC domain. And both the companies are highly focusing on the metropolitan cities, in those highly populated cities, they are launching their other programs like food delivery services and other on-demand services. As they are highly popular, both the companies are welcomed by the users in all their new products and new attempts.

The companies are providing the better offers to its customers and most importantly, they are cost-effective. For analyzing which company is better, we have to analyze their roots and find out their growth journey. Uber operates at the global level, whereas, Lyft operates only in the United States of America.

Among its stack of investors, Uber also has Google Ventures and Baidu. Overall funds of Uber have been raised and making it the 48th most powerful brand in the country of United States.

Lyft, despite their three years, lag, they have become one of the strongest rivals of Uber.

Raw resources

Uber is the winner here. Since it operates at the global level, it has larger fleet and variety of pricing options. It has different varieties; it starts from the low-cost UberX to the costliest UberLUX. It has options of regular taxi, classy sedans, and luxurious SUV. People are impressed by Uber, for the options it provides and it will have different price standard for its every product. As like Lyft, Uber also makes some background verification for the drivers before joining Uber. With this, we can ensure that the company has professional drivers with good knowledge of local streets and they will be familiar with all the routes.

Uber’s popularity and its guidelines for the vehicles will add new vehicles to the company. In which some of the vehicles will be exclusively purchased for the ride-sharing business.

Both Uber and Lyft offer incentives to the drivers. In addition to their pay, the drivers can also get benefited by the incentives. Each company will have the different incentive system. Uber will offer incentives to its drivers after completing the number of trips per day.

Among its overseas cities, Uber first started to operate in Paris, and then it started to expand its business in the markets like Toronto, London, Sydney, Johannesburg, Singapore, New Delhi, Beijing, and Tijuana. Uber has made its popular debut in Lagos city in Nigeria.

Lyft’s strategy is different from Uber, after solidifying its base in one city; the company will begin its establishment in another city. Both the companies make the ride-hailing more easy and comfortable.

Technology and smartphone apps

Both the companies use the smartphone apps to handle the booking of the rides. With the help of the app, the users can book their rides, track the vehicle with the help of GPS, helps the driver in providing the shortest path, and the company can access the electronic payments and ratings.

Uber took two years after its launch to develop its smartphone app, whereas Lyft developed their app soon after the launch because it was the industry standard at that time and most of the people were using the mobile apps for booking their rides.

Uber app will provide the real-time update of cost, traffic conditions, wait-time of the customers and it will intimate the users regarding the surge pricing fares. On the other hand, Lyft is little secretive about its surge pricing.

Lyft’s expansions

The ride-hailing giant in the United States is with the aim of expanding its business into 100 new cities in this 2017. And it has recently launched in 54 more locations. Lyft ride-hailing service is now available in Florida, Pensacola, Springfield, Fargo, Mass, North Dakota, and Lowa city. Since the beginning of 2017, there are 94 new markets for Lyft. With this, the total number of cities has reached 300.

Within the first two months of 2017, Lyft has been established in 100 new cities. The company said that it will continue to maintain this momentum so that people can make use of the safe and affordable Lyft rides. This expansion will obviously tempt Uber to expand its business. Some of the cities are already covered by Uber, in the cities where there is an absence of Uber; the company will establish its presence. This is the right time for Lyft to establish its presence in all the cities of the United States.

Author Bio :-

Anand Rajendran is the Co-founder & CEO of Casperon. He is a content marketing and social media marketing Specialist. He covers many things like e-commerce, marketing, design, development, strategy, plus emerging trends, including omnichannel and cloud replatforming. Getmetaxi is a Software development Company Owned by Casperon Technologies which has launched a Taxi Dispatch Software called Cabily.

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