“For transporting tourist”
by Arthur
Posted on Friday, October 19th, 2007 at 10:48 pm CET
We took many taxis on our holiday in Egypt last week, most of them flagged down on the streets of Sharm El Sheikh. It’s always a big hassle to agree a price with the driver before you get in. You know from seeing official price lists and reading travel books and trip reports what constitutes a fair price, but still they laugh in your face if you mention anything near these prices and make you pay something many times more.
When we visited St. Catherine’s Monastery on 13 October we had our hotel arrange an air conditioned taxi for us for the hotel’s fixed price of 550 LE (Egyptian pounds). One recent trip report we read said that a fair price for a taxi for a full day was much less than that, but we were sick of all the haggling and decided to cough up the 550 LE (roughly 70 Euro) for the 460 km (230 km each way) journey.
Prices at hotels and museums often list separate prices for Egyptians and foreigners. This is fine of course, after all the tourists can afford a much higher price than the locals. But they surely don’t make it a secret that tourists are treated differently; our taxi to the monastery was of the AR company which had the following funny logo stuck on the car’s doors:
See more photos of our trip to Egypt »
We took many taxis on our holiday in Egypt last week, most of them flagged down on the streets of Sharm El Sheikh. It’s always a big hassle to agree a price with the driver before you get in. You know from seeing official price lists and reading travel books and trip reports what constitutes a fair price, but still they laugh in your face if you mention anything near these prices and make you pay something many times more.
When we visited St. Catherine’s Monastery on 13 October we had our hotel arrange an air conditioned taxi for us for the hotel’s fixed price of 550 LE (Egyptian pounds). One recent trip report we read said that a fair price for a taxi for a full day was much less than that, but we were sick of all the haggling and decided to cough up the 550 LE (roughly 70 Euro) for the 460 km (230 km each way) journey.
Prices at hotels and museums often list separate prices for Egyptians and foreigners. This is fine of course, after all the tourists can afford a much higher price than the locals. But they surely don’t make it a secret that tourists are treated differently; our taxi to the monastery was of the AR company which had the following funny logo stuck on the car’s doors:
See more photos of our trip to Egypt »