If you use Lyft to get around town and sometimes ride with friends or family, messing around afterward as you split the fare can sometimes be a pain.
With that in mind, the San Francisco-based ridesharing company is about to launch a way to smooth out the process that will make splitting a fare a little bit easier.
To make it happen, Lyft has partnered with mobile payments service Venmo, a PayPal-owned outfit that already has 60 million people using it to split the cost of restaurant meals, pay for coffee or groceries, and so on.
Venmo is a free app (iOS and Android) that can be linked to your bank account or debit card for easy money transfer and management.
Lyft’s new feature will start rolling out this month before landing for all U.S. Lyft riders in the coming weeks.
When the service becomes available, you’ll need to set it up before you can use it. This means connecting your Lyft account to your Venmo account. To do this, make sure that you have the latest version of both apps installed on your phone and then sign into the accounts if you haven’t already.
How to connect your Lyft account to your Venmo account
- Open your Lyft app and tap Payment in the menu.
- Tap on Add payment method.
- Select Venmo.
- Tap Authorize to allow Lyft to charge Venmo.
How to pay for your ride with Venmo and split the fee
- Tap on the Venmo notification at the end of a ride to go directly to your transaction (without notifications enabled, you’ll need to locate the transaction in the payment feed of your Venmo app at the end of a ride).
- Select that you’d like to split the cost and find the person in Venmo with whom you’d like to share the fare.
Lyft says it understands that few people are traveling in groups at the moment because of the pandemic, but adds that, hopefully, it won’t be too long before things get back to normal, allowing its community to make full use of the new feature.
It’s worth noting that you’ll also be able to use Venmo to pay for bike or scooter rides directly from the Lyft app.
