A New Year’s Eve partygoer in Atlanta racked up a $908 Uber bill with surge pricing after apparently falling asleep in the car, the company has confirmed to the Guardian.
Joseph Martin, whose cousin first posted a screenshot of the receipt on his Twitter page, was reportedly in town for the Peach Bowl, a college football game between Ole Miss and Texas Christian University.
Martin told Fox Sports that he and three friends got an Uber from the hotel where his sister was staying to an afterparty. He said that one of the other members of the car talked to the driver.
“I may have dozed off for a bit,” he said. “My phone woke me up and I didn’t realise we had been driving for about an hour and a half. The other three people in the car were also asleep. I woke one of them up and asked where we were going and what address she gave the driver.”
“She told me and the driver the address and when he looked at his phone they didn’t match up … obviously.”
It was originally reported that Martin had erroneously put his home address in Mississippi into the app and that the journey had crossed several state lines, but both Martin and Uber said that was not the case, though Martin said that the journey had crossed “one state line twice”.
A spokesman for Uber, however, told the Guardian that the journey “never left the Atlanta area”.
He added that the high price was due to surge pricing at the moment the car was booked, and a change in destination due to “an incorrect address being put into the app”.
He also said that Uber had been in touch with Martin and reduced his fare “because it was a mistake”.
