This has been my experience exactly (I’ve tried it in American and international markets, but don’t recall specific cities). I try them like once every 6 months and am always disappointed. You go thru the whole flow to find that there’s a Hotel Tonight fee and therefore the rate is more expensive (or at least isn’t cheaper) than you’d get by simply searching various other travel sites, and they don’t give you a guaranteed room type. Maybe if you don’t care about finding the best deal it’s a nice experience for people? (I most certainly do like to get the best deal though.)
And you don't have to explain the driver where you want to go. Other than being an extremely nice feature, I could see that decreasing lane blockage time as well.
Yep. This happens to me all the time, and is not an edge case at all. Cooking in particular I think will be a much better experience with FaceId. I'm constantly washing my hands, and (at least on my iPhone 6) this means I'm constantly entering in my ~10 character lock code to have a look at the recipe.
I'm a huge fan of buses, and public transportation in general. I like riding buses and subways. I think it's semi-magical that you can get such a far distance on a fixed cost. But can they be improved? I would sure hope so.
I think you do have to be careful with excluding the poor from a new "invention" that is designed to make better the thing that a lot of poor people use. But I don't think poor people not using this initially is a good enough reason not to try.
This so called "guide" only has four things on it?
There are so many examples of this. What about Lyft itself? Isn't that just a "taxi"? By the (low) standards of this article, sure. Obviously though, that characterization would miss something since the entire taxi industry has been upended by the ride-sharing companies.
I think what the author did was think of four companies that were obviously silly in her mind, and characterized them as not wholly original inventions. Which of course they aren't. The thing is, it's rare to find the company that is. Sure it's easy to make fun of Soylent (not saying they're bad or good--just easy to make fun of), but I'm surprised by the author's shortsightedness on something like Lyft Shuttle. I don't know a single person who's said, "Buses? They're great as they are. That's a solved problem."
I'm not an actual potential customer, but my 2¢ is that I was impressed when I saw Hilton and Chick-Fil-A. (Came to report the same issue, but on Safari.)
I check it occasionally when doing a same-day hotel booking and I have never found a good deal. (I've only tried it for US hotels.) Very often the best price I have already found for a hotel will be matched on Hotel Tonight, but then they add their fee on top of it, making it a worse deal. And I don't like that they don't tell you about this fee till late in the purchase flow. Plus (and my info could be out of date on this point), HT doesn't tell you the bed situation in the room. Whereas on other booking sites, I know it's going to be two queens or whatever.
It's a fair point about the dilly-dallying (although I believe there are rules like you can't be more than 3 min late, tho I don't know how strict they are.) I've definitely had rough lyft lines where I seem like I'm really being taken out of my way. But most of the time it's awesome, and kind of fun.
But the important difference that pavel was identifying was that you don't have to decide ahead of time that you are heading to the bus station. That's huge! You decide to head downtown or whereever, pull out the app, bam someone's coming to pick you up. To me this feels very different than, e.g., "casual carpool" in the Bay Area.
This is too bad. I used the service probably five or six times. They were always my go to for renting a car from the airport. (Never used them to lend out my own car, however.)
FlightCar anecdote from the early days: I rented a car from BOS and drove it to a wedding about 4 hours away. Got a call from FlightCar that they actually needed the car back (don't know if the owner returned early, or it was a scheduling screw-up.) So someone drove the 4 hours to me in a different car, met me in my hotel parking lot 30 minutes before the wedding, and we swapped cars. :)
As for FaceTime I think you're SOL. As for iMessage, you can just SMS/MMS text and it's well integrated into the Messages app on both my phone and Mac. My messages to you just appear green instead of blue.
I wasn't bothered by this inaccuracy. It's close enough to the truth so that the joke makes sense. (Well, as much as the joke can be considered to make sense.)