Obi has just published it’s Global Rideshare Report 2024. In the report we examined 75 million global trips and over one billion data points from our own proprietary data set on rideshare searches across global rideshare companies as well as enhancing with public data sources.
We’ve overlaid this with trend analysis looking at topics including inflation and the weather to better understand the changes in price. Additionally, this report includes findings from our exclusive Rideshare Survey with data from 1,727 rideshare consumers. You can download the full report for free here.
One of many interesting data points concerned tipping in New York City, one of the most affluent cities in the world, where the average rent is close to $3,555 according to Housinganywhere.com. So in a city where a glass of wine is now around $25, you would have thought New Yorkers would be increasingly generous to their Uber and Lyft drivers? Unfortunately it seems, that’s not quite true and tipping has been and continues to be a meagre source of income for drivers.
Data from New York City shows that drivers are making an average of $1.15 per tip, up from 2019 when tipping was only $0.87!
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Current data also shows that both historically and present day, Lyft riders are better tippers than Uber. In 2019, the tip in the final fare was 4.18% for Lyft and 2.63% for Uber. The difference was 1.55 percentage points in favor of Lyft, whose rides then were much more expensive. By 2023, that difference had shrunk to 0.35 percentage points and the tip share was 3.98% for Lyft and 3.63% for Uber.
So we have two takeaways:
Lyft riders have been a little more generous. But regardless of provider, with average tip amounts of under $1.50 in a city with over 349,000 millionaires (source https://www.henleyglobal.com/) it does beg the question, why aren’t we being more generous to our drivers?
For more insights, read the full Obi Global Rideshare Report – available for free here.
