The Tuk-Tuk Mafia
One of the more fun/frustrating things about traveling in SE Asia is the need to haggle for things like transportation. There’s always rumors about the so-called “Tuk-Tuk Mafia” that supposedly do everything from price fixing to making sure tourists can’t rent motorcycles, but those have always been brushed off as rumors by locals. However, here in Phuket it has been confirmed to us by a local who offered to take us to our destination, as long as we promised to make the transaction seem as non-taxi-like as possible or else he’d face the wrath of this mafia. We paid by slipping money in the a cupholder, and we waved him off like he was a friend showing us around the island. In a country with so many unlicensed cabs, it was a bizarre experience.
Tuk-tuks are the predominant form of tourist transportation in Thailand. They vary in form depending on the country, but here they’re more or less golf-carts on steroids. You tell your driver your destination, he gives you a price, you offer a counter-price, and then settle wherever it makes you happy. You accept that you’ll probably never get the Thai-price, but you are satisfied with something 10%-50% higher (NOT 2x-5x higher).
Except of course here in Phuket. A 2 mile journey costs more than a New York City cab ride, and hey–at least in a cab you get to be fully enclosed and have a pretty decent chance of survival in the unfortunate case of an accident. I am simply baffled at the $25 charge for a 5-mile journey up the island. This would be crazy in America, but this is absolutely ridiculous in Thailand where you can take a bus 300 miles to Chiang Mai for the same price. BTW, I’m not advocating being a jerk and haggling over everything. But there’s a difference between being overcharged 10cents or even a dollar, than being overcharged $15.
The problem is multi-fold and obviously the local government has a lot to answer for, but since I can do pretty much nothing about that, I’ll blame the people I have a smidgen of a chance of influencing. That would be us, the tourists and travelers. Now, I understand how it is–you walk out of your resort, a tuk-tuk driver tells you it costs $10 to go up the beach. You figure that’s not so bad, and besides–you don’t like haggling and you don’t really want to bother. But here’s the rub: everyone I’ve met in Thailand complains about scams and crazy prices–but it didn’t get this way because Thai people are thieving jerks, it got this way because someone just throws money around and doesn’t care if he’s getting scammed (or he does but just whines about it later.) So don’t be the cause of it! If someone’s quoting you a price more than London or New York, you laugh and walk away. 9 out of 10 the driver will chase you and discount his price. You don’t even have to walk away, just standing there often brings you a discount or the very tricky, “What price do YOU want?” This is Thailand, there isn’t even a meter!
You never to tell a tuk-tuk (or anything without a meter) that you are going to an expensive hotel, even if you are. Tell them you’re going to a nearby cheap hostel and your price suddenly drops. Once we got pretty mad at a shared-truck driver for charging us 5x the local price to our destination, he got pretty embarassed and then admitted to us he only did it because we told him we were going somewhere expensive, therefore, would pay it. On many other occasions, after asking the driver for his price, he went, “uhhh….” and looked us up and down before pulling a number out of the air. We’ve caught people changing their prices mid-haggle because they deemed us dumber/smarter than they originally thought.
Furthermore, we were told by a local that this group of drivers has not only fixed prices to an insane level, but they’ve also set up these signs to make themselves look official. The prices, for what it’s worth, is not based on distance–it’s based on a mix of where you want to go, where you are leaving from, and how much competition there is. We found that the most expensive place to get a tuk-tuk was, surprise surprise, around the resort hotels. One driver had the nerve to ask for about $45 for a 20 minute trip–more than the cost of the airport which was 60 minutes away. But this is where I blame tourists…where on earth did that number come from? There must have been someone out there who thought that price was reasonable. =P
But hell, if some sucker/lazy holidaymaker is willing to pay 10x the local price for something, why not? But let’s remember, just because you don’t want to deal with haggling on your once-a-year vacation doesn’t mean life ends here once you’ve left. You accept a stupidly inflated price and all that does is make it worse and worse for everyone other tourist, and yourself when you come back. This has come to a head in Vientiane (Laos) and here in Phuket where the prices are more expensive than anywhere else in Thailand. When you try and tell a driver that his price is 10x the Bangkok price, they say, “But this is Phuket!” Dude, it’s still Thailand.
I’d personally like to know how much money they need to pay the mafia or whatever, because the way the prices are–if they just took 2 or 3 fares then they’d be making more money than I did in Japan. And no matter what the drivers say, it’s STILL Thailand.
