Travel “came roaring back” during the second quarter of 2022, and ride-hailing supplier Lyft said managed business bookings through its platform soared.
“Managed Lyft business bookings more than doubled [during the quarter], and [was] up 105 percent year over year,” Lyft co-founder and CEO Logan Green said during a Thursday earnings call. In addition, “the airport use-case reached an all-time historic high at 10.2 percent of total rideshare rides.”
The company “made strong investments with the team, and in the airport trip,” Lyft co-founder and president John Zimmer said. “We have a phenomenal partnership with Delta and other airlines because we see it as such a great example. … I think it is both the fact that [it] has hit an all-time high is attributable to the fact people are out traveling again as well as the work we’ve done internally to make that true.”
Green added that the airport experience has improved “in a lot of ways” during the last few years. “It wasn’t clear that the airports even wanted ridesharing to operate there [previously],” he said. “Now, we’re a meaningful portion of their revenue. They are allotting better curb space in many cases, better queuing lots, and we’ve done a ton of product work to improve the experience.”
The company last year launched Priority Pickup, “which gives riders the fastest Lyft pickup experience,” Green said. “We’ve now scaled up over 34 airports. We had to do a lot of work to bring the Priority Pickup experience to airports, but it’s there now and working really nicely,” adding that the company did a lot of the infrastructure “under the hood” in conjunction with airports, and “it has put us in a good place to capture this resurgence of travel.”
Q2 Metrics
Lyft reported quarterly revenue of $990.7 million, a 30 percent increase from $765 million year over year, and 13 percent increase from Q1. It also was just 3 percent below the company’s all-time peak reached in the fourth quarter of 2019, Lyft CFO Elaine Paul said.
Still, the company reported a quarterly net loss of $377.2 million. Adjusted earnings before taxes, interest, depreciation and amortization, however, was $79.1 million, up 232 percent year over year, and the highest “in the company’s history,” according to Green.
Active riders grew by more than 2 million during the quarter compared with Q1 and were the “highest they’ve been since early 2020,” Paul said. The number of active riders was 19.9 million in Q2, up 15.9 percent year over year from 17.1 million, and up 12 percent quarter over quarter. Revenue per active rider increased 11.8 percent to $49.89 from $44.63 one year prior.
The results report came about two weeks after the company confirmed it was laying off 60 employees related to its shuttered direct car-rental operations and was consolidating some regional operations.
