I bet if I include words like "attack" or "sexual assault" in the email then I'll get past their first-line bot response filter. But I don't care about it that much. Fuck 'em.
In any case, I use Lyft exclusively now. Which is fine because I've found that pretty much every Uber driver is also a Lyft driver.
The drivers were sold that they are contractors who make their own hours and don't have a boss.
It makes perfect sense that they are trying to get the best rate, anything else would be leaving money on the table right?
Which was total BS from the start - when they do choose to work, they’re told (by a boss) when/where they do their work. Hardly “own hours and own boss”.
Good for them. As the saying goes in boxing - if you want loyalty, buy a dog.
In the short term, that logic will be to refund your money to keep your annual spend, but not to bother Uber. In the long term, this could raise the fees Uber pays for credit card services.
Long before Uber, a JAX airport auto rental was improperly tacking an $8 fee onto every "paid in full" Hotwire reservation. This can add up over a year. When challenged, they lied and claimed it was an upgrade. American Express of course made no effort to protest this, they just refunded my $8. Not very satisfying, but still my best course of action.
There's typically a thread or two per year where some poor sap gets double charged by Google or similar company, uses a chargeback and then gets their entire account suspended. Poof, all your mails are now permanently gone.
So yeah, only do it if you're OK with never using Uber again.
I had that exact same experience. Some of them even messaged me encouraging me to please cancel for them so that they would not incur a penalty. (I refused.)
I've been using yellow cabs in cities again. Simple & straightforward.
It worked really well for me in those early years. To the point I'd take an Uber home from work if the weather sucked or I was otherwise not in the mood to walk.
The only time I ever had an issue was trying to take a taxi to an airport hotel from the train station nearby. Apparently all of the taxis were waiting in a queue at the airport and noone was going to lose their place in the queue over a 5 minute journey.
I've had the exact some scenario with Bolt.
That's not what they set out to change at all. Their goal from the very beginning was exclusively to change who gets all the money for terrible customer service.
There are scenarios where this is highly predictable. Airports at rush hour will inevitably get this behavior in most places I fly. (Note: I only use Uber internationally, domestically I use Lyft. I do not know how Uber works within the US anymore.)
The solution, if you want to use it, is to pay for the up-market rides. You magically will suddenly stop being canceled. Then Uber goes back to being the way it used to work (the drivers are also more pleasant when they’re actually making money to shuffle you from point A to point B). Or you can do what I’ve taken to doing now that I’m traveling again, and try public transit. Since I mostly travel to major European cities these days, this is usually quite reasonable, and often faster than a car anyway.
The final straw is when I had multiple drivers in a row cancel on me before pickup. When I finally had enough I canceled the ride and then was charged a “cancelation charge” for canceling. The fact that I only canceled after multiple drivers canceled on ME leaving me waiting for 30 minutes was lost on Uber. Since then I’ve sent all my business elsewhere. Per the OP trying to get a human at Uber to apply basic logic to a situation is essentially impossible.