I’m now in Beijing at the Marriott Courtyard (great location – thanks to all the FT’ers for their posts recommending this place for its convenient location!… more on that from me in a forthcoming post) and am trying to find a minivan driver that can fit the 5 of us comfortably (3 in our group are guys over 6’ tall) for a day trip to Mutianyu this Thursday. I’ve seen the various posts here on FT about what it should cost to hire a cab for the day, but we don’t want to split our group up into two cabs. So I need an SUV / minivan for our group – anyone have any good experiences / recommendations?

The Marriott Courtyard said they can organize a 5-seater for RMB1,250 and a 7-8 seater for RMB1,800 – is that reasonable for a hotel-organized vehicle? That seems really high. The hotel said we’d have use of the car all day for our trip to Mutianyu. As a point of reference, the “cab” (really a 10-seater) we flagged at the airport quoted me RMB900 (which I know is high from the FT posts, but we need a big vehicle) – we don’t want to hire him anyway (he had an extremely annoying and concerning “tick” where he continually flashed his brights and turn signals at anything that was in his way, whether cars in front of him or oncoming traffic). He also was greedy, charging for RMB350 for the 30 min cab ride from the airport to the hotel, but we were too tired to negotiate and paid him the 350 – we just wanted to get to our hotel.

If anyone has any recommendations on a driver that can accommodate a group of our size at a better price, I’d love to get them today. (Driver doesn't need to speak English - we have Chinese speakers in our group.) Thanks!