One thing you quickly learn when travelling the world is that being a captive market means that you’ll going to end up paying over the odds for goods and services. Tourists are often seen as suckers by unscrupulous locals – with some justification – so you need to be savvy with your money if you want to avoid paying too much and not having enough left to actually do everything you want to do.
This starts from the moment you first leave the airport. You’ve just been on a long flight and have fought your way through the baggage claim. If you’ve been lucky you may even have your baggage. The point we’re making here is that you’re disoriented and tired and just want to get to your destination as soon as possible to start your actual vacation. This makes you a potential sucker.
When you step outside, you’ll be wanting to get the quickest and easiest route to your hotel. The buses and trains and trams are an option but a scary one with lots of ways to get lost. That leaves the taxis as a safer bet. But also potentially a very expensive one, so FleetLogging has done its research into where in the world you’re most likely to have to spend big on a taxi from the airport.
It’s not good news for tourists planning a trip to Japan unfortunately. If you arrive at Hiroshima or Oita, you’ll be paying an average fare of $165 to get an airport taxi. Europe also has some of the most expensive taxis, with Southend Airport in the UK having an average fare of $146, while Oslo in Norway is around the same price and Iceland, Switzerland and France are all also the $100 mark, along with Hilton Head International Airport in the USA.
Not every airport taxi is quite so prohibitively expensive though, but you have to travel well off the beaten path to find them. The cheapest taxi of them all can be found at Cadjehoun Airport in the African nation of Benin, which will cost you just $1 for a 17km journey. Tunisia, Gambia and Equatorial Guinea also feature in the top ten cheapest taxis, along with Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Armenia, Turkmenistan and Bangladesh, which is the most expensive at just $6.
When it comes to the price per km, Gambia’s Banjul Airport comes out on top for cheap taxis as it costs just $0.15, two cents cheaper than at Cadjehoun. Tajikistan, Iran and Tunisia make up the rest of the top 5, all coming in at under $0.30 per km. At the other end of the scale, Norway’s Bodo Airport offers the worst value taxis with a price of $9.38 per km, ahead of Italy’s Fontanarossa on $8.33 and rivals from Papua New Guinea, Switzerland and Canada.
There are many costs to factor into travelling, from taxes and other related charges, but it’s clear from this research that you can’t underestimate how much it might cost you just to get from the airport to your hotel. So why not have a look at the data for yourself and see how much you might have to pay the next time you go on vacation.