Consumer Expectations Drive Everything (or, 'How I got my son to the airport')

I recently had to get my college-aged son to the Orlando airport for a 7AM flight. He had no car and was staying with some friends in a rental house about 45 minutes away, so we needed to make sure someone was able to pick him up by 5:45AM on a Sunday so he would get to his flight on time.

If you've read my past writing, you know I am a big fan of Uber, their business model, and how so many of the concepts about that business should be applied to real estate (i.e. easy to get a car, great app, transparency). Since I practice what I preach and pretty much Uber everywhere, I suggested he call them to get to the airport.

I've never had an issue getting a car that early in the morning. But I live in Miami, where at that hour, a lot of people are just getting home from a night out and there are plenty of drivers available. My son was staying 45 minutes outside of Orlando in a very residential/quasi-rural area, so we weren't 100% sure that there would be any drivers and didn't want to take a chance, so we decided to reserve him a cab.

Not having called a cab company in years, I started with Yelp, skipped the sponsored ads and settled on a company that had pretty good reviews and was about halfway between the airport where my son was staying. That was the easy part...

• I was running errands when all this was going on, so was having to do all this on my iPhone. Their site was not responsive and I almost went elsewhere. I did not want to have to go back to Yelp, so I suffered through it.
• There was no estimate for what the fare would be, so I had to jump off their site and go to a cab fare estimator. I was shocked when I saw the comparison. Uber was in the $30-35 range, while a regular cab was in the $100-115 range!