Fraserx6

Hi All

We are going to Bali with my daughter for a wedding but will be in Ubud for a few days before. My daughter has been wonderful and organised everything for us but I would like to know the best way to visit sites eg tea plantations, waterfalls etc that may be 30 mins or so drive from Ubud as we will not have a car and do not wish to hire a scooter. Is it best to hire a driver (and if so how do you do that) and have them wait until we have finished or do we hire a taxi to get there and try to hire one when we have finished? We have travelled before but usually in places with extensive public transport.
Thank you for any help you can provided.

Leanne

MmePerdu

For places around town taxis are cheap & plentiful. For longer trips have the management at your accommodation suggest or arrange a driver for you, also very affordable. For places in the countryside have them stay for the return drive. If you plan to go out of town overnight a driver can take you & return. I’ve stayed in & around Ubud several times & transportation was always an easy thing to arrange.

kja

I would happily recommend the driver with whom I worked -- he was fantastic! Send me a PM if you want his contact information.

mrwunrfl

kja, is it Putu?

kja

No -- Amik.

Fraserx6

That would be great thank you

kja

I’m sure you can understand that I am averse to providing Amik’s personal contact information on a public forum. Please send me a personal message (PM) through Fodor’s and I will happily send those details to you.

progol

Why are you now averse to posting a vendor’s information on a travel site? This would be the place to do it and you did post it in your trip report from 5 years ago. By the way, the website doesn’t seem to be active but if you do a search on line, his name comes up in Facebook and other places.

A Memorable Solo Month in Singapore, Java, and Bali

kja

It’s one thing to post a link to a travel site. Providing personal contact information seems to me a very different thing.

progol

But you posted the driver’s contact info in your trip report from Indonesia! I was able to find the driver on the internet but I don’t think the info that you had is still valid unless you’ve been in touch since you were there. I’m always happy to share people’s contact info on travel sites and I imagine that the vendors do, too. Especially since the pandemic when so many have had their incomes impacted.

I don’t think it’s the same thing as posting our personal contact info.

kja

Agree to disagree, including with my own decision of some years ago. And yes, I’ve been in touch with him.

CaliforniaLady

If I may chime in here about the advisability of posting a driver/guide's personal information, I have had mixed feelings about doing so. Here is what happened to me recently.

My husband and I went to the Caucuses last May, and we found a driver of our dreams in Tbilisi, Georgia. We have kept in contact with him. I posted his contact information here awhile back, and he wrote and thanked me for the deluge of inquiries he was getting. I then thought to myself, what if some crazy person books him for several days, and then does not show up? He does not require advance payment. I now feel somehow responsible.

So, in the future, I will take kja's lead, and ask people to PM me here.

kja

Thank you, CaliforniaLady, for articulating one of my concerns. With no intended offense to Fraserx6, the fact is that I don’t know whether he’ll call Amik, let alone whether he’ll be a decent client if he does. (If I had doubts, I wouldn’t share the contact info!) But I think Amik deserves to know how a stranger who reaches him through a private channel learned about him — so when I give an driver’s info out, I also contact him.

I’ve been fortunate to have some outstanding drivers who don’t currently have public web sites. I am delighted to be able to steer some people to them, if they agree to let me provide their contact info ..: and I do make sure to have that permission.

Please note that I am not saying what others should do. I’m just clarifying my current position.

mrwunrfl

>> thanked me for the deluge of inquiries he was getting.

That does not seem to be a bad thing.

CaliforniaLady

It's good and bad. It's good that he may be getting new clients. But it can be bad if he gets a dud.

crellston

I have a numerous contacts around the world that I have used, drivers, guides, accommodation providers and am often asked to recommend someone for something. I take the approach that if I am to provide contact details online then I ask for their agreement first. It is then up to them how they deal with and filter those prospective clients and the risks involved. THEY make the decision not me. If I provide the contact info directly then I suppose there is an element of control and though I have "known" many posters here for many years and have met more than a few, I have no way of know how they will behave as clients.

The other factor to consider in recommending anyone is how that individual will perform in future. I once recommended a guide/fixer to someone for Indonesia. We had a faultless experience with them but the individual I recommend them to, experienced a few problems and wasn't happy. I think the problem there was that this particular guy was getting very popular and began outsourcing to less reliable people. Something that happens a lot. I can recall a Thai guide a few years ago , Tong or something like that, who was very popular and then as their business grew, standards slipped. More recently, I sought recommendations for a driver in Cambodia for our nieces. I sent them the contact info and am sure he would have been great but he wanted to charge 2-3x the going rate so they went elsewhere.

To the original question, as far as sourcing guides and drivers is concerned, we were in Ubud a few years ago for several weeks and just asked our accommodation to recommend and arrange drivers/guides usually the night before and it seemed to work very well. if we were happy with any particular driver and knew what we wanted for the following days then we would arrange there and then.