Does 'The Knowledge' exist for taxi drivers?

[simon43]

I think I already know the answer ...

Yesterday, every single guest booked into my small hotel was taken to the wrong destination by their taxi driver.

- Some drivers clearly couldn't give a damn, took the guest to the nearest (wrong) hotel and told them to get out because this was the hotel that they booked.

- some drivers completely ignored the guest's directions to 'turn left here' etc and insisted that only they knew the correct destination (which they didn't)

- Some drivers relented and called our hotel for directions in Thai, but still failed to understand the most basic of instructions given to them by both me and my Thai staff

- 2 drivers insisted that the hotel was in Patong, even though the hotel name starts with 'Phuket Airport' Duh!!!!

- One driver tried to charge a guest 500 baht to take him 500 metres

I should add that these drivers consisted of taxi-meter drivers, minibus drivers and black taxis.

I've noticed that all have a tendency to ignore the directions of the guest, whether it be to call the hotel number, follow our clear signs at junctions or to follow GPS directions on the customer's mobile phone.

I'm thinking of handing out awards to taxi drivers who actually provide a friendly, efficient and value-for-money service

Simon

PS - 'The Knowledge' is the name of the stringent test that all London cabbies have to pass before they get their operating licence. It requires an extensive knowledge of London streets and the fastest route from A to B

[falkan]

what do you expect from these low lifes? first class service?

[KarenBravo]

Thai people can't even read official maps. They need ones drawn in crayon.

[tingtong]

If your place busy enough to justify it, buy a decent enough second hand car/minibus, and hire a driver who can transport the guests to from your hotel, also could offer a reasonable priced shuttle service to the beach/town/wherever.

If might not be a 100% full solution, but could handle a large® part of your problem, as well as create an additional income flow, considering that taxi service in Phuket is about the most overpriced and far from fair and pro.

[keestha]

Consider giving taxi drivers a small tip when they deliver guests to your hotel. In my experience, it pays off, still plenty of people asking the taxi diver if he knows a nice hotel.

[simon43]

If your place busy enough to justify it buy a decent enough second hand car/minibus...

Yes, we already have hotel vehicles to pick up customers from the airport. But some guests who arrive at the airport fail to contact us beforehand to use our free service and throw themselves at the mercy of the taxi mafia!

Others guests come from hotels in Patong, Kata etc, as well as from Rassada ferry port and further afield.

For all those guests, the taxi mafia will not allow us to pick up the guest, on pain of physical violence to our driver, (demonstrated by a fist-fight last year with one of my staff in Patong).

It's the same for all hotels in Phuket who want to collect guests from another hotel - they cannot. The guest has to use the local taxi service.

Consider giving taxi drivers a small tip when they deliver guests to your hotel. In my experience, it pays off, still plenty of people asking the taxi diver if he knows a nice hotel.

Happily, I don't need walk-in guests or those brought to us by taxis on the chance that the guest will stay. My hotels are fully booked every night with prepaid customers.

Edited February 13, 2014 by simon43

[Briggsy]

I know your question cannot possibly be serious.

Solution, free khao tom and 20 Baht for taxi drivers for every guest arriving safely. Not a very good solution I know.

[simon43]

Solution, free khao tom and 20 Baht for taxi drivers for every guest arriving safely.

I don't think that will work because basically the taxi drivers seem to be ... stupid!

[simon43]

I should point out that the reason why some guests don't request our free airport taxi is because the big booking agents Agoda and Expedia do not provide us with the customer's contact details, (the agent 'owns' the customer). So we cannot contact the guest to warn them of the taxi problems at the airport (or other locations...)

[Briggsy]

There was an earlier thread on giving directions in Thailand. Many experienced posters forwarded the theory that Thais have a different relationship to spatial awareness and location awareness than Western-educated folks.

The theory broadly went like this. To go somewhere Thais had to have been there before. If not, have somebody take them. The journey is mapped, not with distances or turns but by landmarks. You have an added problem as no Phuket taxi driver wants to admit he doesn't know the way, particularly when the passenger armed with a map does!

The second solution is to 'pair' your hotel with the nearest local landmark. Try to find the most well-known landmark as close to your hotel as you can. Also put up signs, as big as possible.

[NomadJoe]

This was exactly my experience when I was working at a dive resort. They are simply rip off merchants. Each tourist is to be exploited to the maximum degree possible. They know very few will want to make a complaint, or even know how to.

If your place busy enough to justify it, buy a decent enough second hand car/minibus, and hire a driver who can transport the guests to from your hotel, also could offer a reasonable priced shuttle service to the beach/town/wherever.

If might not be a 100% full solution, but could handle a large® part of your problem, as well as create an additional income flow, considering that taxi service in Phuket is about the most overpriced and far from fair and pro.

lol. He tried that.

Edited February 13, 2014 by NomadJoe

[simon43]

Sometimes in frustration I ask the idiot driver who calls me and cannot understand either my Thai or that of my staff, if he is actually speaks Thai? That throws them for a moment

Maybe I need to brush up on my spoken southern Thai. I can understand southern Thai, but maybe I should try speaking it back to the drivers!

Simon

[LivinginKata]

'The Knowledge' - you must be joking. These guys can hardly find their way from airport to any main hotel. Problem is that they are not interested, want to make the maximum baht in the minimum time. Then go back to sleep until the next 'mark' comes along to be exploited.

[simon43]

...Problem is that they are not interested

Spot on!

[IrishIvan]

Thai people can't even read official maps. They need ones drawn in crayon.

I keep a stash of 50 photocopied crayon maps to my house because I got sick of redrawing them whenever I went to homepro and other shops

[LivinginKata]

I keep a stash of 50 photocopied crayon maps to my house because I got sick of redrawing them whenever I went to homepro and other shops

That made me cough on my whisky. We buy (replacement) furniture at the same place just about every other week and I still have to draw that stupid map every time. I tried downloading a google map, but oh no, that was far too complex, need the idiot guide to our place

[KarenBravo]

Thai people can't even read official maps. They need ones drawn in crayon.

I keep a stash of 50 photocopied crayon maps to my house because I got sick of redrawing them whenever I went to homepro and other shops

I should do that.

After the missus got a car, she wanted to drive to Khon Kaen from Phuket.

I bought a map, showed her the road numbers on the map, then showed those same numbers on the road signs.

It was a revelation to her and she thought I was incredibly smart until I told her that all farang know this.

Seems that not many Thais actually know why there are numbers on the road signs.

A damning indictment of the Thai education system.

Edited February 13, 2014 by KarenBravo

[eezergood]

Sometimes in frustration I ask the idiot driver who calls me and cannot understand either my Thai or that of my staff, if he is actually speaks Thai? That throws them for a moment

Maybe I need to brush up on my spoken southern Thai. I can understand southern Thai, but maybe I should try speaking it back to the drivers!

Simon

Good luck with that, my mrs is southern born & bred and constantly complains that no one speaks/understands her dialect....

Yes it does include me

[Somtamnication]

Such negativity in this forum. Of course they have the knowledge test.

Wang Thalang, Gems Gallery, Latex shops and that god for saken expensive clothing store on bypass road heading towards Tesco.

If they do not know where these locations are, they are downgraded to tuk tuk school.

[phuketsub]

Phuket has, by far, the most accurate road atlas in all of Thailand: Streets of Phuket.

It is only in English and the publishers, knowing the complete lack of map reading literacy among Thais, have no plans to release a Thai-language version.

A real shame, but the blame has to go to the Thai education system, one of the biggest budget and most corrupt edifices of the state that seldom gets held up to scrutiny.

Anyway, the following puts it nicely, IMHO:

PHUKET: Over the past century, mankind has made astonishing progress in understanding the nature of the universe, but it seems technological advances have now outstripped the ability of many of us to put them to the best possible use.

One good example is in the field of cartography. Maps produced with painstaking effort and considerable risk a century ago, pale in comparison to the wealth of geographic information available to us today.

Global positioning satellites, lasers, computer technology, the internet and scores of other advances have literally put the world at our fingertips – at least for those of us who know where to look.

Few places should stand to benefit more from such advances than Phuket, which annually plays host to millions of visitors who need to get their bearings and who naturally turn to maps for help.

Some excellent printed maps of Phuket are available, such as the English-language 'Streets of Phuket' by Image Asia. Yet so scant is the interest in maps among most people in Phuket that the company feels there is insufficient interest to launch a Thai version, even though most of the heavy lifting by the publisher has already been done.

The truth is that the vast majority of Phuket residents continue to grope in the dark, unable to read simple maps well enough to make their own lives easier, let alone to help foreign visitors.

It's quite common in Phuket to see tourists at roadside carefully studying a free map (collected from the airport), with a local person trying to assist – in vain because he or she lacks the required map-reading skills.

The scenario is reminiscent of the American hillbilly reply to the question: "How do you get to....?" Answer: "You can't get there from here."

How difficult can it be to read a map? And why is it that there is apparently no interest in either teaching or learning it?

The failure of the Thai school system, including some of its most prestigious institutions, to get students to master basic map-reading is a national scandal that gets little, if any, attention.

It would be impossible to estimate the number of man-hours wasted as a result. Anyone, Thai or foreign, who has ever found himself lost on the road in an unfamiliar town knows how time consuming and, ultimately, futile it is to ask a resident how to get from 'here' to anywhere else. This is not a language problem, but rather a reluctance to deal with an abstract, as the map is not the territory.

So not only hapless tourists but also legions of indigenous 'map illiterates' spend countless hours driving around in circles, all the while emitting greenhouse gases and hoping that serendipity or divine intervention will somehow get them to their destination.

Taxi drivers and others in the public transport sector here are often as map-averse as the general public. The bulk of them, it seems, don’t know the names of the roads they use almost every day. And for navigation they depend on a vague set of mental landmarks and instructions from passengers, many of whom are on the island for the first time.

The resulting confusion, and the violence that sometimes ensues, is just another manifestation of the lugubrious state of public transport in Phuket.

http://www.phuketgazette.net/phuket_news/2013/Phuket-Opinion-Legacy-of-accuracy-in-black-and-white-22429.html

[Guest]

If I understood correctly, you have several hotels nearby the airport. Float helium filled balloons with led lights inside, with number 1 to 3 on top of your hotels. You could even color code those to show if you have room "green" or if the hotel is full "red".

A bit the same what Phuket town is doing to show some of the event locations.

It's quite difficult for the drivers to play dumb when your customers can see the marks right after they get out of the terminal.

You could also share your hotel placemarks on the hotel website and advise the customers to download the gps locations to their phones even before they leave their home countries.

[uptheos]

Can't imagine a bunch of wannabe Bangkok cab drivers, cottening out routes and searching points on a map. Then doing the said routes and at night calling them over with mates. Afterwards going to the PCO for interviews, come back two months, 6 weeks, 1 month etc. And doing this for 18 months! (Londoners and Black cab drivers will understand)

[simon43]

...and advise the customers to download the gps locations to their phones even before they leave their home countries.

Some customers already do that, but the taxi drivers refuse to follow the customer's directions to 'turn left here' etc. They simply feel that they know best and will drive aimlessly around until they attempt to offload the guests at the wrong hotel.

Your suggestion of helium balloons might not go down too well with the airport authorities... Also, I do not want a 747 landing on my head

[sean in udon]

Does 'the knowledge' exist for Thai taxi drivers?

You really have a great sense of humour

Sent from my iPhone using Thaivisa Connect Thailand

[Guest]

Your suggestion of helium balloons might not go down too well with the airport authorities... Also, I do not want a 747 landing on my head

Airplanes never land on the lights, but next to those.

Best business practises. Wipe out your competitors and then declare your hotel as sacred. Taxi mafia would never be brave enough to challenge your powers

[thrilled]

I could be wrong,but I have heard Thai's don't learn map reading in school.If that is the case if you show A map to A a Thai person he might not understand what he's looking at.

[JesseFrank]

I keep a stash of 50 photocopied crayon maps to my house because I got sick of redrawing them whenever I went to homepro and other shops

That made me cough on my whisky. We buy (replacement) furniture at the same place just about every other week and I still have to draw that stupid map every time. I tried downloading a google map, but oh no, that was far too complex, need the idiot guide to our place

If you have to buy replacement furniture every other week, isn't it time then that you look for a place that sells better quality.

Just saying.

[Torrens54]

Sorry, but..... as my daughter and her schoolmates would say, "555!"

[IrishIvan]

I keep a stash of 50 photocopied crayon maps to my house because I got sick of redrawing them whenever I went to homepro and other shops

That made me cough on my whisky. We buy (replacement) furniture at the same place just about every other week and I still have to draw that stupid map every time. I tried downloading a google map, but oh no, that was far too complex, need the idiot guide to our place

If you have to buy replacement furniture every other week, isn't it time then that you look for a place that sells better quality.

Just saying.

Ive had a few businesses here that require more furniture, moved house a few times, replaced furniture. Also when getting foxtel and internet put on the crayon maps make an appearance, when receiving stuff by courier, buying sporting goods, new TVs, driers, second hand goods, having motorbike repaired and dropped off....the list is endless. After 10 years you find that things needs replacing or upgrading every 2 or so years and sell on the old stuff.

Actually I think it might be one of those places opposite Big C, has one of my crayon drawings on file

[stevehaigh]

funniest thread title i've seen in a long time