Call your own taxi if you can.

Yeah, I do that. The hotel I'll stay at had a call button for taxis. From the hotel to Tottenham Court Road Station is about £15 or £16. I'm ok with that.

Last trip to Rome, we stayed in a Holiday Inn resort 5 miles out in the suburbs. They had a machine that called for taxi service, and the taxi was usually there withing 2-3 minutes. No price uptick either.

Haven't had an upcharge experience in France.

Okay, maybe I should say be careful about this.

One trip to Rome I asked the desk to call me a taxi for the morning to return to the airport. It was there on time, but it was a flat rate and a bit more than the trip in from the airport. It wasnt really a "taxi" it was a car for hire. My only purpose for this is to suggest you be aware.

And in all fairness, this is something to be mindful of. I am at the mercy of whatever driver takes the fare and shows up to pick me up and in my mind I have already accepted whatever the cost will be. I'd like to believe that I know what a cab from Broken Wharf to Tottenham Court Road Station should cost. But what if I am in another city that doesn't have the same sort of regulations?

When awe were in Ilulissat, Greenland this summer, there was no way for us to call a cab. They do not take phone calls at all as it is entirely app based. The kink in that is that you have to have a local phone number attached to that app, so visitors have no way to call a cab. Our apartment host would either take us or use his phone app to arrange one for us. Otherwise we walked down a steep hill and to one of the grocery stores where there was a taxi stand.

In Iceland we have used taxis quite a bit and have never had an upcharge. We know the going rates there though, so that helps. The hotels that have called taxis for us tell us exactly how much it will be ahead of time.

This is a good reminder to be on the lookout for unreliable threads. (That's why I trust travel experts like Rick Steves vs. random posters on miscellaneous forums!)

So take my advice: always ask the hotel for help in securing a taxi... except in Pittsburgh when you are wearing a cleveland browns jersey. Those Steelers will steer you wrong!

Happy travels.

Everything these days is by App. Makes it even easier to "call" the taxi yourself. Not more trying to pronounce a Serbian street name so the taxi will know where you are.

I know in the past, in some cities, the start fee was higher if you got a taxi on the street than it was if you called for one.

If the hotel calls for you, and if the hotel told you in advance how much it would be then one of two things, 1) you are in a city that charges by zone to and from the airport or 2) you paid more than a metered taxi that you called yourself.

In many places, including my home town, if you call a licensed taxi to come to pick you up, you pay a charge for the bit of the trip to get to you. Ubers, minicabs etc, it's whatever price they quote.

This is a good reminder to be on the lookout for unreliable threads.

Exactly!! Especially when one makes generalizations that seemingly apply to all countries.

I have been on two recent trips (Vienna and Iceland) where the “official” taxi from the airport was way more expensive then my return ride when I had the hotel call a taxi for me.

The city i live in there is no charge to get to you but every cab charges a flat start fee which i suppose covers that and compensates for short hauls. My city all the cab fares are the same, and set by the government, but contract drivers like the hotel might call are a different animal. Good, just different.

The reason for a lot of threads is the dialogue where an understanding, if not consensus, begins. Not sure how "you could" is a generalization. But if the thread uncovers that my friend and me many years ago was a 1 in 10.000; nothing wrong with that. Try and have a happy life.

Ok, coming clean here. The friend in question was me. I have taken taxis to and from the airport numerous times in Budapest. I know the going rate. I know the drill.

But I had need of TWO taxis the other morning and couldn’t schedule two (at the same time) from the City Taxi app nor call one myself (I have no phone calling ability except WhatsApp). So I asked my hotel to call City Taxi for me for two taxis for the following morning.

Not only did they not call City Taxi (it was another company), but the taxis charged a flat rate and the driver told me it was now required for all taxis. Apparently that isn’t true. The rate I paid was not hugely higher but I do think it’s an indication that the hotel has an arrangement that benefited them as well as the company they called (after trying to talk me into a rate that needed to be paid in cash).

I then asked Mr. Ë if this was a new system here but he had just used the regular metered taxi to the airport last week.

In my case, I wasn’t too worried about the price difference. It did cost me about $20 more than it should have. But if you need to watch your expenses carefully, having the desk call a taxi definitely wasn’t benefiting ME. But if I weren’t a frequent visitor, there’s really no way I would know.

This is a good reminder to be on the lookout for unreliable threads.

Not sure if you meant this was an unreliable thread or not. Maybe a little too broad, but not unreliable.

The edits have reduced the unreliability since the original imperative, direct advice has been qualified and watered down. I'll accept "too broad" coupled with a sort of "could be right as well as could be wrong" tone in the edited version now present!

While I wouldn't want to generalize on my limited experiences and my advice is non-expert and my sample size is alas limited to me, still I have been quite happy with the taxis I have procured with assistance of hotels (except in Pittsburgh but don't get me started on those steelers!)

Happy travels.