We're in Las Vegas this week at the International Consumer Electronics Show, known as CES, where the biggest names in tech show off their latest products for the year.

Historically, Vegas has been a city dominated by taxis. But this year at CES, for the first time, the ride-hailing companies Uber and Lyft are allowed to operate in the city. Lyft made its entrance first, back in the fall at McCarran International Airport, but Uber launched around the same time.

Both Uber and Lyft have been falling over themselves this week, lowering fares and offering steep discounts to first-time riders to attract users. (Uber and Lyft, I've noticed this week, are now way cheaper than a local taxi here.)

Normally when I'm in New York City, I open the Uber app and hail a car without much thought. But here, much to my surprise, it has been much more convenient to use Lyft. And isn't the whole selling point of a ride-hailing app its convenience factor?

Oddly, when you type in your destination to these companies' apps in Vegas, you receive specific instructions about where to go to be picked up. For example, I tried leaving Mandalay Bay Convention Center in an Uber the other day, and it instructed me to go to a specific place outside the hotel. (Taxis still get preferential pickup and drop-off locations at venues, and Uber and Lyft are forced to make alternate arrangements to pick up customers.) This isn't the case in New York and other cities.

But even after I followed the instructions, my Uber driver couldn't find me, and it ultimately took 15 minutes of his driving around and my walking around for us to meet up. Later in the day it was raining, and a colleague and I tried hailing an Uber to pick us up at the Aria, but we ended up on a fruitless 15-minute goose chase in a downpour to meet up with the Uber driver. We ended up canceling the ride when we couldn't find him, and we took a cab back to the hotel.

Conversely, my experiences with Lyft here have been great — despite having to follow the same weird pickup instructions, my drivers haven't had any problems finding me and vice versa. In the end, I wonder whether this boils down to who has the most accurate mapping technology, or whether it's a matter of which company is better at these weird pickup workarounds they've been forced to adopt. Or maybe I'm just really bad at hailing Uber cars (my rating, after all, is a meager 4.6).

An Uber and Lyft driver named Ryan wrote to me to explain why Lyft might be better at picking up customers. Here's what he told me:

Lyft gives you an exact GPS location that the pin is dropped. You can use Apple Maps, Google Maps, or Waze to navigate there. Apple and Google are highly accurate, and Waze is only good to navigate traffic. If you're in the hotel lobby when you hail a ride, I will see the pin clearly in the foyer of the building. I can even circle around to see if I can get closer or if there's a better door in relation to your pin, then notify you of my arrival after I'm sure I'm in the best place. After some practice you pretty much know where to expect your rider by using a highly accurate Google Map. Uber uses an in-app map. We aren't given an address just in case. We can see a pin but cannot zoom in in the in-app map. The app also announces our arrival automatically, even if we're not sure which door you're at, leaving some awkward people scanning to see who's on their phone then looking up.

Some other interesting nuggets I've gleaned from the cabbies and Uber and Lyft drivers I've talked to here: