Originally Posted by
Soju
Never allow the hotel to call you a taxi in Thailand, or in many other countries. You will always be expected to pay more. Often the taxis are waiting there, sometimes for quite a while, and they expect you to pay extra to compensate them for their wait time and the convenience of having a readily available taxi, which I suppose is fair, provided you know what the deal is. I try my best to never get a waiting taxi anyplace but simply flag down a passing taxi and you'll normally get less hassles in doing so.
OK, Soju, that's fine, but the hotel did advertise that they would arrange a taxi which was "safer and more secure" than hailing one off the street. And all this for only an additional 20 bt. Seemed like a reasonable deal to me. Pity it didn't work out in practice.
The other issue is that I didn't want to walk several hundred metres to the main road to try and hail a cab at 4 am.