Which Taxi App is the Best Overall for the Biggest Cities in the UK?

bery_451

Hi,

Getting to a place by train or plane seems to be a nightmare nowadays with all this travel strike chaos.

Is there a taxi app that compares the fares to find out which taxi app service is the cheapest for a route within the city?

Which taxi app is recommended to download that is the best overall in price, customer passenger reviews, app features, passenger reward programmes/discounts, passenger rights and such? There's dozens of taxi apps in the store, yeah everybody knows Uber however is there a better alternative?

Cheers,

marcia_

 I use Alpha in Liverpool but they say it can be used anywhere uk & Ireland.
 Don't use Uber, mainly because of their price surging 

yerdi_devo

I'd recommend using Uber because of their reputation. I travel almost every month and every time I need a cab, I go for Uber. I mean, sometimes you can meet bad/unfriendly driver, but they do have customer support and two times they even returned me money.

martindow

yerdi_devo said:

I'd recommend using Uber because of their reputation.

Hmm

https://www.theguardian.com/news/series/uber-files

CKhalvashi

yerdi_devo said:

I'd recommend using Uber because of their reputation. I travel almost every month and every time I need a cab, I go for Uber. I mean, sometimes you can meet bad/unfriendly driver, but they do have customer support and two times they even returned me money.

The reputation of not paying tax?
The reputation of not paying minimum wage to their drivers?
The reputation of giving refunds to you and stealing this money from the driver when they've worked for it?

Find a decent local minicab firm, many have apps now and many accept cards in the car.

bery_451

yerdi_devo said:

I'd recommend using Uber because of their reputation. I travel almost every month and every time I need a cab, I go for Uber. I mean, sometimes you can meet bad/unfriendly driver, but they do have customer support and two times they even returned me money.

Yeah everybody knows Uber, they have the most cars and the most drivers. Is Uber the cheapest best value taxi service out there?

Is there like a better value cheaper alternative to Uber with similar amount of cars/drivers and similar customer service?

CKhalvashi

Uber are often not the cheapest due to how they calculate their fares.

You're often better off with a mileage only rate than mileage+time, especially in a city.

Once again, try to find a local company in the cities you visit. You're then supporting local jobs for about the same price and generally such companies trade on their reputation exactly because they're competing with the likes of Uber.

bery_451

CKhalvashi said:

Uber are often not the cheapest due to how they calculate their fares.

You're often better off with a mileage only rate than mileage+time, especially in a city.

Once again, try to find a local company in the cities you visit. You're then supporting local jobs for about the same price and generally such companies trade on their reputation exactly because they're competing with the likes of Uber.

Okay from Birmingham, which companies you recommend?

Which ones are mileage only? Cheers,

Ergates

Longer term you're best not using Uber too.  Their policy is to essentially undercut all the existing taxi firms - using their massive amount of investment cash to subsidise fares- until all their competition has gone out of business.  Then they can raise prices to whatever they want.  They also openly flout just about every law and regulation they can find and laugh about doing it.

As an organisation they're almost comically evil - they're like a villain from a Bond film, only less interesting.

Sandtree

CKhalvashi said:

Once again, try to find a local company in the cities you visit. You're then supporting local jobs for about the same price and generally such companies trade on their reputation exactly because they're competing with the likes of Uber.

Where do you think the Uber taxi drivers live?

Local companies are fine for planned trips but if you find yourself on a random street corner and wanting a car "now" a single local company can often be a 30min-1hr wait, particularly in a large city. Large apps like Uber its more likely to be a 5-10 minute wait. 

Not sure there is ever a single overall best option because each have such different pricing models and you cannot predict surge charging/time components etc that some use. Plus then there is priorities... would you prefer a £10 fare but 1hr wait for pickup or £11 fare and pickup in under 5 minutes?

[Deleted User]

Birmingham has Bolt and Ola operating alongside Uber, TOA is a local firm with a similar app

Depending on where you are, you can usually hail a black cab without issue by the station for example but the rest have to be pre-booked