The Lyft app likes to play games with the tip amount. Sometimes your choices are $1-$2-$3 and other times it's random amounts. (Not a whole dollar amount and not an obvious set percentage, like 15%-18%-20%)

One time it was random, but the lowest option was over 20%, so I did not tip at all. When it's $1-$2-$3 (or $5, or whatever), I try to hit the one that is 15%-ish or a little more.

I like that Lyft can then send me a ride report with one total amount for all of my rides in a given city. I can then submit 1 receipt on an expense report with a total amount, even if there were 10+ rides. Also helps to show that almost every time, using Lyft for a business trip is cheaper than a rental car.

I wish Uber had ride reports. (If they do, I can't find them.)

Last week, one business trip, 6 Lyfts and 3 Ubers. 1 Lyft receipt, 3 Uber receipts. The Lyft Ride Report shows all of the To/From info as well.

Our company just matches the total on the receipt to the total on the expense report: they don't know or care how it hits the credit card.

For those of you who do not tip Uber drivers, have you noticed a plummet in your rider rating?

I came to read this thread to see how others tip. I tip $5 for a ride from/ to airport that costs $22-$25. Pay tips in cash. Pay close to 20% on most rides. Use both Uber and Lyft. Many drivers drive for both. Been taking Lyft, lately, because of discount offers.
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My main complaint is that many airports make it hard to find where to go to get picked up. FLL is hard to know where to go first time AND you always have to wait 5-8 min. for a car. SAN has easy to follow direction signs and car arrives in 2 minutes. (FLL has gotten better w. signage in recent months. Still long wait for car.)

I've only had one trip to FLL in the Uber/Lyft era - a couple months ago - and it was an 11 minute wait for cars. Everybody around me was also waiting a long time.

Yet the fare for a long ride (about halfway to Miami along the coast) seemed crazy cheap. This is a case where I wish the fare was higher and more drivers were available for airport pickups. My fare was like $30 w/tip, a friend going to the same meeting took a cab and paid $80. I know cabs are an outrageous ripoff, but it seems like Lyft/Uber are going too low here. I don't think I had any unusual discounts working beyond the ubiquitous 10% that seems to show up on most of my rides.

I have 30% right now, and have had 50% in the past, although those have a $6.00 maximum discount.

I haven't noticed any "game playing" at all. What would even be the point of that? I used to get suggestions for 3 different whole dollar amounts, now I get suggestions for three different percentages (clearly labeled both as the absolute dollar amount and the percentage, so it's perfectly clear).

In BOTH cases, I've always had the option to specify the amount I'd like to tip rather than take one of the app's suggestions.

Maybe about a year ago, there were reports of Uber ratings going lower if you didn't obviously tip a driver (in come cases, drivers only rated customers that handed them cash tips). Over the past few months, my Uber rating has stabilized, rising from the high 4.6 range to about 4.75 stars. My tipping behavior hasn't changed - I usually tip, but often a day or two later. It seems like Uber has found a way to limit the ability for drivers to rate customers poorly for their tipping practices.

Mine sometimes shifts back and forth. The "game" being played is that we're being conditioned to accept the fact that tipping is normal, and tipping in increasingly-higher-amount is normal.

What's the point for Lyft? Right now, Uber and Lyft aren't measured by profitability - it's purely a market-share game. So they can use this twofold to capture more share: (1) they always had a head start on Uber in terms of allowing tipping, so that helped them attract drivers. Now, they can continue edging the tipping amounts up and try to remain popular, even though Uber now also has tipping. (2) By conditioning people to the acceptability of tipping, it allows them to post artificially-low upfront rates, increasing market share with riders.

There's probably more to it than that, and the fact that the format is constantly changing makes me almost certain that they're collecting data about behaviors when it's a fixed amount vs. random amount vs. amount that is an exact percentage of the base fare. We're being tested. There are occasions when I don't tip, hoping that's at least one data point to suggest that all three options given to me are too high.

I had hoped that ridesharing would eliminate the third-world scourge of tipping, but that did not happen.