Unwarranted unfair treatment of an elderly passenger.

I am writing about a completely unwarranted attack on my mother with a threat to deny her access to her account, which happens to be MY account which I pay for.

My mother received an uncalled-for and untrue email message from Uber to the effect that she had ridden without a mask on 1 July. As she is utterly paranoid about getting the virus, I cannot imagine in my wildest dreams her EVER neglecting to don her mask. In fact she was being picked up from Pick'n'Pay, where guards don't let you through the doors without a mask, so she had both a shield mask and a cloth face cover with her. Why wasn't she simply politely requested by the driver to put them on in the wildly unlikely event she had taken them off after leaving the shop?

On Uber's website it states that drivers and passengers are REQUIRED to wear masks. If my mother had no mask on, then why was she allowed access to the car at all???All Uber users are trusting that Uber enforces this rule for everybody's safety, and it is shocking to hear Uber drivers could be allowing non-compliant passengers to enter their vehicles!! I refuse to believe that there is no reservation on the right of admission to an Uber taxi by a member of public who is in some way undesirable.

In my belief this complaint was made to pre-empt her from complaining about an overly-long drive undertaken at an excessive speed. My mother went from home to Pick'n'Pay with the first Uber driver earlier that day and the trip was 1.74 kilometres and cost R26-00. The trip back from the same shop to the same residential premises was over 6 kilometres long and cost me R66-00. How can the distance between her home and the shop possibly triple in just over an hour? And if a driver is inept at following simple route instructions on his GPS, why should his inability to do his job properly be for the consumer's account?

As a long time Uber user, I vigorously object to being threatened access to my account, and to my mother being similarly threatened, and I object to drivers who, because my mother is old, assume she is senile and try to hoodwink her by taking the longest route possible in order to inflate the price. To add insult to injury, they then lie about my mother's non-compliance with Covid-19 precautions to try to pre-empt her complaining about their inadequacy and bad service.

It is also disgusting that there is no easy access email to Uber to lay complaints with them personally, and that one has to take to social media instead.