French court fines Uber, execs for illegal taxi service
Personal anecdote, of course, but Uber saved my ass while I was in Europe (specifically Paris and Madrid).<p>Immediately upon arriving via train to Paris from London we were harassed by a number of sketchy looking individuals claiming to be &quot;taxi&quot; drivers, of course not speaking French I really had no way to validate the claims, they all became hostile towards me the minute I took my camera out.<p>I resorted to opening the Uber app and lo and behold had a validated ride within minutes.  The service was exceptional and they even spoke English relatively well.<p>Fast forward 24 hours,  I thought I had booked a flight out of the airport in the city about 20 mins drive, turns out my flight was actually out of the airport much further north of Paris.<p>I rushed to get an Uber and my driver was extremely friendly and not only brought me to the exact bus station I needed to be at, also showed me exactly which ticket to purchase and where to wait.<p>Never in my life have I received close to that level of service from a taxi driver.<p>A couple weeks later in Madrid we found ourselves pretty far away from our flat, not well equipped for the weather and ready to head back.  We saw several advertisements for the local taxi services &quot;ride sharing&quot; app and decided to give it a shot.  After jumping between a couple starbucks to find reasonable wifi, we ordered a taxi and proceeded to wait 20+ minutes for a driver to finally show up in the app as our pickup, however, the actual taxi was nowhere to be found.  No text &#x2F; call &#x2F; messages in the app ever succeeded.   Once again we resorted to Uber and had a painless experience.<p>I guess my point overall is that Uber offers a familiar service no matter what country I happen to be in.  It&#x27;s simply not viable for a foreigner to arrive in a new country, find out what ride sharing taxi service is allowed existence there, download the app, finagle my way through the most-likely non english friendly sign-up process and enter my personal banking details only to find out the service doesn&#x27;t even work for whatever reason.<p>Don&#x27;t get me wrong, I love traveling to new places and truly exploring a city without all the luxuries and convenience of home, but when I arrive in a new place with expensive items in tow, I&#x27;d MUCH rather pay for the convenience of a safe and familiar ride to get to my destination then risk getting scammed or taken advantage of otherwise, I also don&#x27;t always arrive with local currency in tow and don&#x27;t like paying exorbitant fees at major transport hubs.