Complaints Taxi Drivers Sydney

We decided on taking a cab to & fro to the international airport after reading thru' the forum. Our experience:- 1.

Dozens of taxi drivers have been fined in a police sting for refusing to take short fares from Melbourne Airport. Plain-clothes Fawkner Highway Patrol officers posing.

Taxi from airport to Adina Apt at Kent Street. It was a very hot day. The driver did not switch on the air-condition. I asked if it was not working. His reply 'window open'. I told him, it's really hot and he grudgingly switch it on.

When we reached our apt, he refused to get out of his cab to help my husband unload the bags even tho' we had problem opening the boot door. Taxi from apt to International airport- taxi driver asked which way to use - we said we are not sure. He said $4.90 extra and wave a device which I assumed it's the automatic deduction metre for using the tunnel/highway. It was a fast/smooth ride.

When we arrived at the airport, he said $7. 2002 Download It Microsoft Picture Manager 2007 Portable North. 50 extra! Total of $57.50 which is $21/- extra to what we paid for our trip from airport to apt 7 days ago.

That cost us $36 and not using the highway/tunnel. This driver also did not switch on his air-condition. Are the drivers all trying to save petrol? Both drivers were aggresive in their body language. We were suprised at the taxi service at such an International city.

Was going to say that to.The Silver Service taxis have a more customer orientated approach.They do get out and help with luggage etc.Im sure under OH&S now a lot of cabbies wont help with luggage with fear of injury or 'damage' to ones luggage if dropped etc. A lot of cabbies are their own bosses.That is they own the plates to the cab and are only contracted with a firm,some are employees yes,and of course the part timers have no real idea at the best of times,especially if they feel that all they will do is transfers to the CBD and Airport,heaven forbid if they are asked to go anywhere else. My husband usually load and unload the luggages himself whenever we take a cab but in most places, when there is more than one bag, the taxi drivers will help. In this instance, he was having problem opening the boot. The driver just sat there and let him juggle with the catch of the boot until he got it open which is about 3 try. By the way, the hotel book the cab for us and as we are tourist, we do know which taxi company to use. The trip was taken at 2:30pm which is not peak hours.

Interesting comments generated. Thanks all - hope this will help other tourist to Sydney. If we Sydney people put up with poor service, that's what we'll get. I don't blame a visitor for not standing up to a slack taxi driver - but we who live here should do it every time - or we deserve the poor service we're complaining about. I don't give a flying fruitbat about their so-called oh&s issues, which I frankly think is the greatest excuse I've heard in a long while for pure laziness. What rot - I'm not talking about a 50kg bag - I'm talking about less than 20kgs and common courtesy.

Besides which, any oh&s person would tell them they should not be sitting for 8-10 hours - the exercise of getting out, stretching and lifting a bag or two into the boot is good for their spine! If the driver / lazy lout is too unfit to do that, he's far too unfit to be driving a cab I'm paying to travel in. I had the unfortunate experience of trying to use Silver Service Taxis in Sydney recently Ordering a taxi for the airport on one occasion necessitated my son running to the top of the street to hail the driver who drove past the sign posted street a couple of times and kept missing the turn off. When he finally reached me he most reluctantly got out of the taxi to load my bags into the boot.

And in my opinion was surly and no apology was forth coming My second and much more serious issue concerned ringing for a silver service taxi in the morning (about 2 hours before required) and requesting a child restraint seat for my granddaughter. 15 minutes after the taxi was due I re-rang asking where my taxi was. The operator checked when my request had been logged and then told me they were very busy because of the rain. But, he would attempt to urgently get a taxi to me within the next 10-15 minutes. I am still waiting! Surely a warning to the effect they were unable to get a taxi to me would have been appropriate and given me the chance to try another company.And we never got to our appointment.

Unfortunately there are structural problems in the taxi industry that cause these kinds of issues - primarily the almost complete reliance on independent contractors for taxi drivers. Wondershare Data Recovery Serial Key Mac. The drivers, as contractors, have the ability to accept or reject any booking, and if yours was for a short distance but had the extra hassle of the child seat requirement, few drivers would have been attracted to it. It's sort of an odd situation because the NSW government keeps increasing the number of taxis in response to some of these kinds of complaints (particularly about late-night taxi availability). But instead all the new drivers, who mostly set their own hours and working area, seem to spend most of their time going after the more lucrative jobs. The issue for them is that they get so few jobs in a shift, if they don't have a few lucrative ones, they won't even make back their cost for renting the cab.

So they are even less likely to attend to a small job in the suburbs like what Dawn W needed. By the way, Silver Service is part of Taxis Combined, a unit of Cabcharge, which is the largest taxi operator. They have so many Silver Service cabs these days that their service levels seem to have declined as evidenced here (though some of their cabbies are still quite good). And sometimes a Silver Service booking will be answered by a taxi in the regular Taxis Combined network. You'd think that the taxi companies (networks) would try to protect their reputation by coming up with a system to require certain jobs to be picked up. But the problem is that with the current system, is that their customer is not really the taxi rider! Their customer is the owners who pay to join the network, and in turn the drivers who rent cabs from the owners.

Whether the actual passenger gets good service is not really of consequence to them as long as the driver and owners are paying their fees to the network. I recommend looking into taxi booking apps like GoCatch and Uber. While there still may be issues with drivers not picking up short jobs, at least you have much more insight into what's going on, and while you're not entirely cutting out the middleman (Uber and Cocatch replace the traditional networks in collecting a small fee), the process seems to be much smoother.

The backlash against Uber’s surge pricing in the midst of an Australian on Monday was swift and decisive. Uber riders in Sydney started tweeting about price hikes shortly after an armed assailant burst into a city cafe and took hostages, prompting a massive evacuation of offices and shops in the surrounding area. Fees hiked upwards of four times their normal rate, Mashable.

“I understand the way the business works — higher the demand, higher the charge — but four-times at $100 minimum is ridiculous,” one Uber user told Mashable. Almost price gouging at its worst.” That “price gouging” argument echoed across social media Sunday evening, as it looked to many like Uber was trying to capitalize on a potentially deadly emergency. That conversation added another public relations headache to what’s already been a for Uber, which is facing lawsuits in several cities and an allegation that a male driver in India raped a female passenger. Swarming because of a concert or event?

Swarming during a hostage crisis? — Char 🎁🎅🎄 (@universe93) Uber reversed course within an hour, full refunds to affected users and free rides to those who were still trying to evacuate the area (Drivers were still getting paid).

Even then, Uber added one last defensive note about its pricing policy: “Please note that surge pricing is used to encourage more drivers to come online and pick up passengers from the area,” Uber wrote on its official blog. That supply-and-demand surge pricing argument has become a common refrain for the company, which has occasionally bumped up against public resistance to its shifting fares. “Seven decades of fixed pricing in car transportation is a lot to unwind in a night,” wrote Uber CEO Travis Kalanick in 2012. Two years later, questions about surge pricing still linger — such as: What is Uber’s surge pricing? Uber’s pricing algorithm automatically detects situations of high demand and low supply and hikes the price in increments, depending on the scale of the shortage. Those higher prices are supposed to make drivers more likely to bite, putting more Uber cars on the road when they’re most needed.

Demand surges have also been monitored by Uber’s human staffers, who have on rare occasions used their discretion to lower prices. After the great Uber Fare Hike of New Year’s Eve in 2012, for instance, Kalanick the scene at Uber Mission Control. “To our dismay,” he wrote, “the pricing multiplier kept going up.”.

“At some point the east coast cities started breaking 6x multipliers—we accepted defeat at that point—the unbending demand breaking our will. We would bring cities down to 3x, only to see conversion go up, supply go down, cars get saturated, and “zeroes” popping everywhere.” Zeroes are Uber’s term for riders who open the app and see no available cars in their area. Does “surge pricing” get more drivers on the road? The basic principles of economics would dictate it does — as would Uber’s experience. According to a blog post by Uber board member Bill Gurley, the program has been a success since its inception in early 2012.

Uber’s Boston team first tinkered with a price hike on weekend nights around 1 a.m., when drivers tended to clock out just as the city’s public transit system approached closing time, a situation that created lots of demand for Uber cars. “In just two weeks they had a resounding answer,” Gurley. “By offering more money to drivers, they were able to increase on-the-road supply of drivers by 70-80%, and more importantly eliminate two-thirds of the unfulfilled requests.” Economists call this responsiveness to price “elasticity.” Uber’s service does appear to be unusually elastic, given that its fleet of drivers expands and contracts in real time. Is there a limit to Uber’s surge pricing?

Uber recently announced an algorithm change that sets maximum surge pricing levels during states of emergency in the U.S. When disaster strikes, Uber fares at a price that matches the area’s fourth highest price over the preceding two months. Uber has also vowed to donate its 20% commission on rides during emergencies to the American Red Cross. In non-emergency situations, surge pricing of six to eight times the regular fare have cropped up in moments of extreme shortages. The highest multiple ever recorded was 50 times the regular fare, or $57 per minute, due to an apparent glitch in Uber’s fares in Stockholm, Sweden, Business Insider. $57 per minute? Is that even legal?

Yes, though it can skirt the boundaries of legality under extreme circumstances. At least 34 states and the District of Columbia have passed that forbid businesses from hiking prices in times of extreme emergencies. New York, for instance, can levy penalties of $10,000 for a business that marks up an “unconscionably excessive price” during an “abnormal disruption of the market,” such as Hurricane Sandy. However, businesses can defend themselves by pointing to higher costs of supplying their service.

Does Uber worry about negative publicity from surge pricing? As the hostage crisis in Syndey revealed, in extreme times of need, price hikes, rational as they may be, can also unleash a publicity nightmare. Still, it seems no matter how hard Uber tries to explain its price system, riders’ final fare can still raise hackles. It’s practically become a meme on social media to an image of a receipt for a three-figure ride, plus an expletive-laced tirade against surge pricing — despite the fact that the Uber app is very clear about surge pricing before users agree to a ride. Uber board member Bill Gurley pointed out that the company would hazard a far worse form of publicity if it cancelled surge pricing: Chronic shortages of drivers. Better to weather the odd storm, he reasons, than risk a stream of complaints from “tons and tons of unsatisfied customers.” Uber’s hostage crisis pricing flap may prompt a review of Uber’s pricing policy under extreme circumstances. But for the rest of the time, expect Uber’s surge pricing to stick around.