Bangkok taxi fare

To add to some useful information you might need to do your own DIY Bangkok trip, here are some tourist tips when going around Bangkok via taxi.

When planning your trip, have an estimate of your fare in case there's no BTS near your planned destination.

I did this with the help of googlemaps and a fare table of Bangkok's taxis. Here's how I went about it:

For example, you want to go from Suan Lum Night Market to Silom Soi 22.

1. Locate your origin in googlemaps.

2. Click "From here"  and type your destination in the space provided to get driving directions. You can type the address or street or just the name of the establishment you want to go to. In the example below, I wanted to get driving directions to Silom Soi 22. Click on the "Go" button to get driving directions and the distance from the 2 areas.

3. You can now see how far a car (or cab) may go from Point A to Point B. Take note of the distance.

4. To compute for the possible cab fare, you can use the table below. Since it's around 4.0 km from Suan Lum Night Market to Silom Soi 22 (or vice versa), it might cost you around 43 to 45 baht for the cab fare. Take note that in case of traffic jam or the cab is stalled for some reason, there's an additional charge of 1.25 baht per minute.

Actual fare table inside the taxi

Now, depending on the location, there may be more than one driving directions results. In that case, I compute for the option with the farther distance.

Of course, the above method is just a guide. The actual fare may vary from the one you computed.

Other tips on taking a cab in Bangkok.

Insist on using the meter.

If you've been lurking in forums on Bangkok, I'm sure you've heard of this advice a number of times. Some fellow tourists say that it may take several taxis before you get a driver that would agree on using the meter since most really prefer quoting a fixed price. In our case, we just lined up the airport taxi queue and when we were assigned a cab, we immediately asked the driver to use the meter---and she agreed! (Yes, our cab driver is a "she.") Same thing happened when we hailed a cab from Suan Lum Night Market to our hotel. The driver gave no qualms when we asked him to use the meter.

English speaking cab drivers

This means the driver can speak English :)

There are cabs with stickers like the one in the picture above which gives you an idea that the driver knows how to speak in English. I'd like to emphasize that when I said that the driver knows how to speak in English, I don't mean that they are proficient in English. Our cab back to the airport has this sticker on and the driver and I were able to understand each other. Of course, he still speaks in broken English and has an accent but it's far better than our first driver who doesn't speak English at all.