Uber warned on its website that New Year's Eve customers should not be surprised by "surge pricing" due to the high holiday demand.
>> UBER: What is surge pricing?
And, yet, many were. Actually, “surprised” is probably not the word. Maybe “shocked” is more like it, for customers who ended up paying nearly 10 times the normal rate for a ride.
Uber defends surge pricing this year, just as it has in the past, noting that it's the simple economics of supply and demand driving the rates.
If you were an Uber user on New Year's Eve, the cost of a ride depended on where you were. In the San Francisco Bay area, riders reported surge pricing did not really kick in until well after midnight and did not surge much over double the rate.
But check out complaints from riders in other cities:
