‘Horrendous’: Man charged £600 for 30-minute Uber journey
‘I can’t believe they’ve been so unreasonable,’ says customer
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A man said he was in “complete shock” after discovering he’d been charged £606 for a 28-minute cab ride.
Rich Phillips, 27, had ordered an Uber to take him from a festival in Coventry to a local pub last August.
But when he woke up the next day, he discovered the cab had continued onto London after dropping him and his friends off, and from there to Nuneaton in Warwickshire, a journey of more than four and a half hours and 234 miles.
When he queried the fare with Uber, Mr Philips said he met resistance.
“I was in complete shock when I saw the charge to my bank account from Uber,” he told the Mirror.
“We were in The Ivy House bar all night and had a great time but to wake up to a charge for £606 for a trip from Coventry to London to Nuneaton was just horrendous.”
Even when Mr Philips got hold of CCTV footage showing that he was at the bar from 10.58pm-3.28am, Uber still refused to refund him.
”The trip was requested from the device associated with your account, and we see no illegitimate logins from any other device prior to the trip taking place,” the car service messaged him via the app.
“To further understand what may have happened, we reached out to the partner driver who advised there was more than one passenger in the vehicle and the passengers requested multiple stops along the way.
”We are sorry to hear that it appears someone else may have taken your trip request.
“Unfortunately Rich, all riders must be responsible for their own account activity.”
However, Uber has now refunded Mr Philips since the Mirror got in touch.
“We are always happy to review a trip if there are concerns about the route taken, and provide a fare adjustment where appropriate,” said an Uber spokesperson.
”In this case, we apologise that we did not meet our usual high standards of customer care, and the customer has been fully refunded for the trip."
It follows tourists in Paris being warned after one couple was scammed out of almost €250 by an unscrupulous driver in 2018.
The two Thai tourists filmed the incident and uploaded it to YouTube; the video, which quickly went viral, shows the driver demanding €247 for the 45km ride from Charles de Gaulle airport to the city centre.
The pair were charged nearly five times the actual fare – official Paris cabs have a flat fee of €50 or €55 from the airport to anywhere on the Right Bank or Left Bank respectively.
The driver was subsequently found and sentenced to eight months in prison.
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