Ask anyone who visited Bucharest before 2015 for their airport story, and there is a good chance it involves a taxi. Not a bad flight, not a lost bag: a taxi driver, a suspiciously fast-moving meter, and a bill that made no sense.
That story is true often enough that it became the city’s unofficial welcome ritual. It still happens, occasionally. But it happens far less than it used to, and the reasons why say something about how this country actually deals with its problems.
The Version Everyone Remembers
The classic Bucharest taxi scam followed a script simple enough to work on tired travellers in any language. A driver would wait just outside arrivals, sometimes in a car that looked official enough, sometimes not. The meter would run a little too fast, or a flat fee would be quoted before you even said where you were going, always well above the real price. If you paid with a large bill, there was, somehow, never any change.
Some versions were more elaborate. A driver might insist the printed rate on the door was “for locals only.” Another might drive a longer route and blame traffic that did not exist. A few, more aggressively, simply refused to open the boot until the inflated fare was paid in full.
It relied on a captive audience: someone jet-lagged, unfamiliar with the currency, and standing at an airport with nowhere else to go.
Why It Thrived
Conditions in Bucharest made the scam almost inevitable. Bucharest in the 1990s and early 2000s was, in the words of more than one guidebook, something close to the Wild West of Eastern European travel. The taxi market was fragmented, poorly regulated, and largely cash-based, with fares that varied wildly from one company’s cab to the next. Tourism itself was new.
Nobody, including the city, had quite worked out how to manage it.
Under those conditions, a driver willing to bend the rules had every incentive to try, and very little chance of being caught.
What Actually Changed It
Three things happened, roughly in sequence, and together they did more to dismantle the scam than any tourism campaign could have.
The first was Uber, which entered the Romanian market in 2015. For the first time, visitors had a fixed, visible price before the ride even started, with no cash and no negotiation involved. Bolt followed. Within a few years, a large share of airport arrivals were simply opening an app instead of walking toward the taxi rank at all.
The second was legal, and considerably less talked about. In 2019, alongside the law that formally legalised ridesharing, the government issued a separate emergency decree targeting unlicensed “pirate” drivers specifically, the ones without a taxi licence who worked the arrivals halls and train stations. Under the new rules, driving passengers for money without a licence became an offence punishable with an on-the-spot fine of up to 5,000 lei, roughly ten times what it had been before. Drivers, for once, stood to lose something by getting caught.
The third was simpler still: Henri Coandă Airport installed touchscreen kiosks inside the arrivals hall, where travellers could order an official taxi directly, with a printed ticket showing the company, the rate, and the car number before anyone said a word to a driver. It removed the one moment where the scam used to work best, that first, disorienting minute after baggage claim.
Not Gone, Just Smaller
The scam has not vanished. Traveller reviews from as recently as last year describe the same basic move: a driver at the arrivals curb, a quoted or metered price two to three times the real fare, and a passenger too tired or too far from a solution to argue.
What has changed is the size of the target. The scam used to work on nearly anyone who took a taxi in Bucharest. Now it survives only in the narrow window where someone bypasses the kiosk, ignores the apps, and gets straight into a car waiting at the curb, still, occasionally, a licensed one, banking on a fare no one will double-check. That is a much smaller trap than it used to be, and considerably easier to sidestep: use the airport kiosk, use Uber or Bolt, or at the very least, check that the meter is running before the car moves.
A Different War, Still Going
Uber and Bolt’s arrival didn’t end the tension in Romania’s taxi industry; it moved somewhere else. For a decade, traditional taxi drivers accused ridesharing platforms of operating under looser rules and lower taxes while competing for the same passengers. In February 2025, that frustration brought over 800 taxis to a protest outside Parliament in Bucharest, part of a push that has since won traditional taxis new ground: caps on ridesharing fleet sizes, mandatory driver ID badges, and closer tax scrutiny of the platforms.
This wasn’t the first time: taxi drivers protested the same platforms as far back as 2017.
That fight has nothing to do with the old airport scam. Taxi unions and ridesharing companies alike have every reason to want it gone for good. But it’s a reminder that “taxi versus Uber” in Romania never really settled. It just isn’t happening at the arrivals hall anymore.
None of this made headlines the way a new highway or a EU funding announcement does. But it’s the kind of change that actually reaches a visitor: a country that used to let its worst actors operate in plain sight at the airport now has laws, apps, and infrastructure working, however imperfectly, in the other direction. Bucharest didn’t fix its taxi problem by chance. It fixed it the way most functioning places do: slowly, unevenly, and mostly by pressure from below.
© Photos 2 & 3 are under Adobe Stock license
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