[adzii_nufc]

Tried Uber once, a few months ago when I was in London. I'd just gotten to Gatwick Airport and the £20 fee for a 5 mile trip via taxi to my hotel was laughable so I tried Uber which gave me a £7 quid cost. Unfortunately it appears Uber drivers hanging around Gatwick airport are just cherry picking fares into central London and straight up decline you after a phone call and establishing you're actually going in the other direction. Seemed like a pretty nice system though being able to GPS plot.

As for Taxi's, we had a company a few years ago and we started relying more on contracts than phone bookings. Set fares became the norm as prices had to get lower but not low enough to swing it back round, it's a dying job. If you don't get contracts for companies then you need to hope you're the most popular gig in town. Example being we had a contract with Shearings travel (Coach Holidays) whom used to book in a 16 seater to take a group from a service station all the way to their holiday destination. The fare was set and agreed in writing for future business based on destination and I always assumed it was because they didn't have enough demand for that Holiday to ship them down via Coach. This would set the driver up for a week though, He'd make a weeks usual earnings in one day and then double that with the return on the Friday and those with the PCV Licence each got a rotation so it'd be someone else the next week.