Ridesharing provider Lyft noted the continuing recovery of airport rides, which can correlate to business travel, during the company's fourth-quarter earnings call Tuesday. Airport rides for the quarter more than doubled year over year, Lyft CFO Elaine Paul said.
"The airport rides are longer and the revenue is higher per ride," Paul said. Those rides reached 9 percent of ride volume in the fourth quarter, "which compared nicely to the 9.4 percent in the fourth quarter of 2019," she added.
Lyft reported $970 million in fourth-quarter revenue, a 70 percent year-over-year increase and up 12 percent from the $864 million in revenue reported the previous quarter. It was down slightly from the $1 billion reported for Q4 2019. Still, the company's Q4 2021 net loss was $259 million, down from a $458 million loss in Q4 2020, and less than the $356 million loss reported in 2019.
Full-year 2021 revenue was $3.2 billion, a 36 percent year-over-year increase, and a drop of $400 million compared with the $3.6 billion reported in 2019. The net loss for the year was $1 billion versus $1.8 billion one year prior. The company's net loss in 2019 was $2.6 billion.
The company's active riders for the quarter were up 49 percent year over year to just over 18,700. Revenue per active rider reached an all-time high of $51.79 during the quarter, Paul said.
Though 2021 ended with what executives called a strong quarter, cofounder and CEO Logan Green said that the Covid-19 omicron variant had a "significant" negative impact on ride volumes in January and also will affect near-term growth. Still, he added that the spike in the U.S. had peaked, and the company expected demand to recover.
"The last week of January saw a pickup in rideshare rides," he said. "Demand rebound is a matter of when, not if."
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