Getting fleeced for a ride home for Christmas is peak holiday spirit. Travelers on the Ibanda to Mbarara run in Uganda are getting hammered by a huge spike in taxi fares right now, with the operator group ITODA blaming Christmas travel patterns. The usual cost of seven or eight thousand shillings for that trip has jumped to around ten thousand. The return trip from Mbarara back to Ibanda is even wilder, hitting up to twenty thousand shillings.
People at the Ibanda Taxi Park are pretty annoyed, saying this is the worst time for a price gouge since holiday spending is already crushing their wallets. A rep for the taxi drivers, Twaha Sonko, basically said it is simple supply and demand. He explained that fewer people are heading out of Ibanda during the festivities, so the drivers have to charge the ones who are traveling more to cover their basic costs, like fuel. He asked passengers to just deal with it for a little while.
Sonko promised the fares would drop back down after the holiday rush ends and passenger numbers level out again. Until then, anyone needing to use that route is just told to plan for the bigger hit to their budget and accept it as a temporary seasonal scam.
People at the Ibanda Taxi Park are pretty annoyed, saying this is the worst time for a price gouge since holiday spending is already crushing their wallets. A rep for the taxi drivers, Twaha Sonko, basically said it is simple supply and demand. He explained that fewer people are heading out of Ibanda during the festivities, so the drivers have to charge the ones who are traveling more to cover their basic costs, like fuel. He asked passengers to just deal with it for a little while.
Sonko promised the fares would drop back down after the holiday rush ends and passenger numbers level out again. Until then, anyone needing to use that route is just told to plan for the bigger hit to their budget and accept it as a temporary seasonal scam.
