Truth About “Tourist Inflation”

For me this is less about what the taxis are charging but about the practices many of them employ to overcharge people they perceive to be tourists and underserve the locals. I have no problem with allowing taxi drivers to charge a fair and living wage. You are right to point out that taxi drivers are for the most part somewhere at the bottom of the social totem pole and often are taken advantage of by those with more power. However, they support and manipulate an opaque system that is open abuse and allows unscrupulous drivers to try and overcharge some people while not properly serving neighborhoods where tourists don't congregate. They have printed sheets that supposedly tell you what the rate is supposed to be from one area to another but if you ask 5 taxi drivers the cost for the same trip you are likely to get 5 different answers because the sheets they have only have a limited number of point to point trips. Not to mention that it is easy enough to print up a sheet, have it laminated, and pass it off to the uninformed as "the official rates". The government needs to have a better system (i.e. taxi meters, or publicly available and easily accessible rate sheets, posted signs, etc.), and the taxi union needs to stop looking the other way for drivers who abuse the system. The taxi drivers need to stop involving tourists in their territorial spats and lying to tourists about what the rates and rules are. It leaves many people with a bad impression of Zihuatanejo and the system of governance here.