While having a large quadcopter fly you to your seat would surely be the ideal way to arrive for a stadium event, we’re guessing such a service is still a ways off.
A second-best method might be Lyft’s new offering. Announced this week, the ridesharing company said it has partnered with ticket service SeatGeek to make the process of getting to your seat at a gig or sports game as simple as possible.
Anyone who’s ever been to a huge stadium — and yes, most of them are huge — will know all too well how much time can be wasted trying to hunt down the right ticket gate. If you’re running late, chances are you’ll end up reaching your seat out of breath in a sweaty funk, having missed the start of whatever it is you’ve gone to see.
In an effort to ensure a more dignified arrival, Lyft and SeatGeek are working together to drop you off as close to your seat as possible, “saving up to 30 minutes in walking time at larger stadium venues,” the ridesharing company said in a post announcing the new service.
Lyft said that customers “who request a Lyft ride through the SeatGeek app will automatically have their seat location featured in the Lyft app, ensuring the driver drops them off as close to their seat as possible.”
Sounds good. The only downside is the extremely narrow nature of the launch, limited as it is to fans visiting Providence Park in Oregon, home to Major League Soccer’s Portland Timbers. “Timbers fans attending games via the SeatGeek app [iOS and Android] will automatically be dropped off at the best gate for their seats when taking a Lyft, saving them crucial time getting around the stadium,” Lyft promised.
The company has been working on improving pick-up and drop-off accuracy for a couple of years, though this is the first time it has partnered with another outfit for stadium rides.
In 2016, it launched a “precise location selection” feature for its app at 200 sites across the U.S. So while you would ordinarily indicate that you want to be driven to a particular airport, the feature — if it’s active for that particular location — will offer up more precise drop-off points, such as a particular entry door for the terminal you’re heading to. Of course, you could explain a precise arrival point to your driver as you go, but Lyft hopes the option helps to improve the journey experience by letting you focus on other things.
