Earlier this year I concluded that Citi’s Blacklane credit was difficult to extract full value from. A few months later, Blacklane emailed me a targeted US$50 voucher, creating an opportunity to test that conclusion again.
Targeted Blacklane email offering a US$50 (or equivalent currency) discount
I don’t have any particular attachment to Blacklane. Their service is undeniably more polished than a standard rideshare, but that’s rarely enough to justify paying materially more. After years of taking multiple rides each week, I’m usually looking for the cheapest practical way to get from A to B.
With that in mind, knowing that Blacklane is more expensive than my usual choices, I opened up the app to see how it priced a short journey I was already planning to take at 6.15pm later that day.
Blacklane fare after applying the £50 promotional voucher
Unexpectedly generous
Rather than converting US$50 into roughly £37, Blacklane simply applied a £50 discount. UK users therefore received roughly one-third more value from the same promotion.
As for the fare, I wouldn’t normally have considered paying £80 for that journey, but with the offer applied, it brought the price back in line with what an UberX journey was pricing for at the same 6.15pm start time.
For comparison, UberX quoted almost exactly the same price.
UberX quote for the same journey booked in advance
Still, Blacklane is a different product. Chauffeurs are pre-booked, pickup times are generally more predictable and the experience tends to feel more polished than a typical Uber Exec ride let alone a standard UberX ride. Whether that’s worth paying for depends entirely on the journey.
Uber Exec was around £13 more expensive.
Uber Exec pricing for the same journey
At that point, the economics looked compelling. I could book the journey I was already planning to take for roughly the same price as UberX while receiving a chauffeur service that compared more closely with Uber Exec. Based on the prices available then, it looked like a free upgrade.
Since Citi reimburses up to $100 of Blacklane spend every six months, this roughly £30 fare would consume around US$40 of that allowance. I’ve struggled to realize a high percentage of that, as outlined in A $100 Blacklane Credit Isn’t Worth $100 so any opportunity to get me closer to the real value is worth a look.
Because UberX was quoting almost exactly the same price, it initially looked as though I’d extracted close to full value from that portion of the credit.
A few minutes before pickup, I checked Uber again. This time I searched for an immediate ride rather than a scheduled one.
By departure time, UberX pricing had fallen dramatically
UberX had fallen to just £10.94.
In other words, I’d effectively spent around US$40 of Citi Blacklane credit to avoid paying an £11 Uber fare. The economics suddenly looked much less attractive.
A reminder that timing matters just as much as discounts: a comparison that looks compelling several hours before departure can look completely different once it’s actually time to travel. If the first experiment showed how easy it is to overpay simply to use a credit, this one showed how quickly the economics can change.