Tourist charged $310 for 2.5 mile carriage ride!

Who can you trust in Rome? Friendly, honest-looking carriage drivers will abuse trust by charging as much as they think they can get away with. Always agree a firm price with carriage drivers or cabbies before getting in.

Yes folks, it still happens - It's 2004, and despite the highly civilised levels of brotherly love, peace and understanding allegedly at large in the Western world today, Italians in Rome are still ripping off tourists as hard and as fast as ever. James emails us from England with this tale of woe:

"Dear Romebuddy,

Firstly, congratulations on a great site. I have just discovered you whilst searching the web looking for someone to whom I could complain about an incident which occurred whilst in Rome recently.
I wonder if you could let me know if there exists an Italian tourist bureau department which deals with complaints?

I am almost too embarrassed to relate this story....

My girlfriend and I flew to Rome and stayed at the Hotel Colosseum on via Sforza. We had a great stay all-told and the hotel was very good. However on our second day, having just finished our lunch at the Pantheon, we decided to take a ride in a horse drawn chaise to the Colosseum and back to the Piazza Navona. My girlfriend asked how much the ride was and the driver replied something to the effect that "it depended on the time it took". I know we should have fixed a price. The journey took 50 mins and the driver was extremely chatty and cordial. When we were deposited at the Piazza Navona the driver asked us for Euro 250 for the fare. In shock, I paid it. After 2 mins, I went back to remonstrate, but he was gone.

I am very angry with myself above all else. And I feel such a fool. I saw the driver taking some Japanese the next day and I made a note of his number. I know full well it is too late to do anything now, but just doing something will make me feel better. I would much appreciate your views on this. Many thanks,

James"

Romebuddy says:

The round trip that James and his girlfriend were taken on is only two and a half miles. And a horse-drawn ride is supposed to be slow and leisurely. Yet this guy charged as if for a taxi-ride, actually penalised his passengers for wanting the slow romantic ride he was ostensibly advertising, and charged his fare over six dollars a minute to listen to his 'cordial and chatty' banter. His rate can obviously be calculated at $370 an hour. Let's conservatively say that he works a twelve-hour day - 9am till 9pm, and only gets a fare every couple of hours - alright, lets say he only actually spends four hours a day actually carrying a paying tourist - That's still $1480 a day. Hey, this isn't even the high tourist season - This incident happened in January. So we can make a fairly well informed guess that he's working all year at this. But let's very conservatively say that the guy only works less than half the year, say, only a hundred and fifty days a year. That's an income of $222,000 per annum. So this guy can make over two hundred grand a year, and for what? Sitting on his ass, that's what. And for the rest of the year, you can bet he's either got another job somewhere, or else he just sits by the pool listening to the soccer scores.

It looks like this is not some quaint little local guy you need to feel sorry for. At night, after he puts the horse into the stable, he probably gets into a Mercedes and drives the rest of the way home, you betcha. When you hire him to drive you around the block, you're not 'helping the local economy' - You're not 'helping those poor locals feed their children'. You're being shafted, bigtime. As Jeff Bridges once put it in that memorable movie 'The Big Lebowski', "we're not talking about someone who built the railroads here". You're not helping some bright, enterprising but poor disadvantaged working class European middle-aged guy get on his feet again after the local shoe factory closed down and made him redundant - You're more likely to be helping him buy a second home, with swimming pool and tennis court, probably somewhere up in Liguria, the Italian Riviera.

How long did you take to put aside and save up the money for your holiday in Rome? Of course, that's not a problem our horse and cart driver would know anything about - He can probably just take off for Paris or Honolulu any time he likes on what he's earning (from you).

Oh, and my how those Italians scream about exploitative American capitalist imperialism. But the truth is, as we can see, the Italians are the biggest capitalist swindlers on the block.

Well obviously this has to stop. The remedy is simple - When these creeps come touting their business to you, just say no. If we all did this, we could apply strong consumer pressure to these shysters to make them lower their rates to a fair price.

And if this is what the horse and cart drivers are scoring off you the tourist, think how much the restaurateurs and hoteliers and souvenir sellers could be charging you over cost...

In this little cautionary tale, we also see the basic commercial stupidity of Italians in the tourist industry - The advantage they have of being able to rip off tourists who they assume (and hope) will never come back anyway, will now work to their disadvantage, because sites like ours can now warn tourists of the ripoffs awaiting you before you even decide to come here. In hiring the horse and cart driver, in essence, what James was actually paying for was a happy memory. But what he was actually sold was a bad memory. You see, Italians are the world's masters of disappointment - They are experts at 'the let-down' - They are the undisputed kings of the art of selling a dream that in fact only leaves a bad taste in the mouth. Italian shops and service providers create dissatisfied customers by the thousand. At this moment in time, the world is probably full of ex-tourists to Rome who never want to go back there again. Ever. And you can see why, can't you? If James ever goes back to Rome, he'll not be hiring any chaise rides here again, and neither, dear reader, if you put any worth in the words on this page at all, will you.

Romebuddy.com exists partly for this reason - to alert tourists to the dangers and ripoffs of Rome, a city which has for too long hidden behind glossy tourist brochures and old ruins that the locals didn't even build in the first place. Romebuddy.com is a consumer guide to a city. Thankfully, with the age of the internet and the increasing number of websites like ours, consumers can now make more informed decisions about holiday destinations, and what they spend their money on when they get there.

The way things stand at the moment, why should you bother coming to Rome for a vacation at all? Clearly, Italians are waiting here to rip you off, the majority of young Italians who will be serving you in the various bars, stores and restaurants are vehemently anti-American, they hate you behind your back, and you'll probably get blown up or kidnapped by terrorists on the way over here anyway. Talk about bang for buck...

And to our critics who say that Romebuddy is giving Rome a bad name?
No - It's guys like the cabbie in the story above who are doing that...

In contrast, Romebuddy is actually helping Rome by alerting Italians involved in the tourist industry (who have ears to hear) to the true needs of tourists, and to problem areas in the services they provide that need attending to, to ensure that tourists and expatriate professionals posted here enjoy their stay in Italy, take home happy memories, and more importantly (for economic growth, instead of stagnation and decline of the Italian tourist industry) come back again to spend more time and more money in this potentially wonderful country. Businesses thrive on repeat customers, but a business which does not listen to its customers will eventually fail, or be superseded by one which does.

In the changing world political climate, one of Italy's largest target markets for tourism, North Americans, may have less desire to get on a plane and fly to Europe for a vacation than they may once have done. How will the Italian tourist industry respond to this? The ball's in their court. A city administration which does little or nothing to enforce legislation that could curb or eradicate local operators such as the extortionate chaise-driver mentioned above cannot expect continuing goodwill and revenue from visiting overseas tourists forever. Clearly, the Roman tourist industry is living on borrowed time, and on the questionable fascinations of some tired and rather dowdy local relics which, relative to the shabbiness of the city's service infrastructure and the idiosyncrasies of the local culture simply cannot cut the mustard anymore. Venice may be sinking into the sea, but Rome may be sinking into disrepute.

Romebuddy is a Roman - We live here. We want Rome to be a nicer, fairer place for everybody - for both tourists and Italians. Because Italians even rip each other off. It's just that tourists are more vulnerable, so it is to you, the non-Italian tourist or expatriate in Italy, that this site is dedicated.

No country or culture is perfect - Nations and people of differing ethnicities can often learn much from each other. And here at Romebuddy, we don't have all the answers. We're just your buddy, the friend you know, in the city you don't. Rome's a great town, and most of your time here should be enjoyable - But if ever it isn't, well, we know where you're coming from because we've probably been there too, and... we feel your pain.
Enjoy our site - We've tried to pack it full of useful info that we hope all adds up to helping you be Roman street-savvy and possibly avoiding calamities and ripoffs here such as that suffered by James above.

If you've already been ripped off in Italy, for any kind of product or service, there's a few online organisations who may be able to help you seek recompense, and who would at least be interested to hear your complaint and probably add it to their public databases of shoddy or unethical traders and scam artists. So try clicking on some of these links below:

Sergio Scicchitano
is a Rome-based lawyer who is the city council's delegate for consumer rights. He offers free support for a service which passes on tourist-related complaints to the relevant offices. His Rome office is in Viale Trastevere 66, phone (Italy 0039) 06 5815 7959 or
Email s.scicchitano@comune.roma.it

The Better Business Bureau
http://www.bbb.org
American based complaints registration and reconciliation bureau with links to similar international egencies. You could perhaps use this for complaints against Italian apartment letters operating through American agents.

EConsumer
http://www.econsumer.gov
For international ecommerce complaints

World Advocacy
http://www.worldadvocacy.com
Site which basically lists and links to all kinds of other sites worldwide which deal in obtaining justice and instigating class action suits for the wronged and ripped off, including shafted consumers.

The National Italian Consumer Protection Board
http://mica-dgfe.casaccia.enea.it
...who I'll be frankly surprised if they lift a finger to help, but even so, these people need a wake-up call from the increasing amount of international clientele which Italian tourism attracts.

Altroconsumo
http://www.altroconsumo.it
Independently published Italian consumer protection and product survey magazine

FederConsumatori
http://www.federconsumatori.it
Another independent consumer action organisation, Rome-based, which is nice.

Use Google Language Tools to translate the Italian websites into a rough form of English.

Are we over-reacting?
Perhaps the orientation of those consumer-protection sites listed above is in fact a little too heavy for small gripes about Italian horse and cart drivers. Most are more concerned with class actions against big corporations - But we have to start somewhere guys, right? If these consumer-protection organisations start to catch the flavour of a growing undercurrent of mass tourist dissatisfaction with Italian business ethics, it could lead to a wider, more formalised and public inquiry into this kind of stuff and induce a new climate of consumer rights awareness in Italy that will benefit us all. But if we stay silent and do nothing, then nothing will change, and the rip-offs will continue. Click here for some more real-life stories from victims of thieves and rip-off merchants in Rome.

Adam Nixon ©2004