How Does Lyft Acceptance Rate Work For Drivers?
What is Lyft’s Acceptance Rate?
For Lyft drivers, understanding the company’s Acceptance Rate protocol is crucial to understanding pay rate. Technically speaking, Lyft’s acceptance rate is the percentage of ride requests a driver accepts and completes each week (it resets weekly at 5AM on Mondays). A fully completed ride includes the acceptance and either dropping the rider off at their destination or marking the rider down as a no show. Further, rider cancellations do not count as “completed” rides and therefore do not count towards your acceptance rate. This rate is then converted to determine passenger wait times and keep them as short as possible.
How To Calculate Your Acceptance Rate
A driver’s acceptance rate can be calculated with this simple formula:
Rides Completed + Rides marked as “no show” / Total ride requests
If a driver has completed 100 rides in one week, but misses 5 requests and cancels another 5, the driver’s acceptance rate would look something like this:
Rides Completed (100) / 10 = 90%
This driver’s acceptance rate would be 90%!
Acceptance Rate and Lyft Line
Acceptance Rate is also affected by Lyft Line rides. Each pickup during a Lyft Line counts as one ride. If you pick up three different friends during one Line, this will count as three rides. Similarly, if Lyft Line rides are cancelled, they do not count as rides. However, if a Lyft Line is cancelled because of an incorrect number of passengers, then this ride is considered a “no show” and will still count as a ride.
Reasons Your Acceptance Rate Might Decrease
There are a few reasons why a driver’s acceptance rate might decrease. First of all, and put simply, Lyft tracks all missed requests, and there requests count towards a driver’s acceptance rate. However, if a ride is cancelled due to poor connectivity or any other technical difficulties, Lyft will not count these missed requests towards the overall acceptance rate. Second of all, any cancelled rides count against a driver’s acceptance rate, though no shows and rider-cancelled rides do not.
Though a negative acceptance rate does not penalize drivers, it works as positive reinforcement. Drivers can earn incentives through high acceptance rates, which encourages drivers to pursue a positive acceptance rate without fear of losing out if they have a negative acceptance rate.
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