Our experience flying out of Cebu on 1st January 2017 was quite traumatic. I strongly recommend booking a traditional cab with a trusted provider like Danny Noy (recommended on TA) +639061534659 or Mario (an associate of Danny who drove us) +639266710973. At this time the airport drop rate was 500 peso. The other thing is that mobile phone networks in the Philippines have rather bad connectivity so even in Cebu I had no data outside a busy shopping center. So relying on app taxis can be costly.
Traditional taxis and Uber and Grab cars were either drunk or asleep at 330 am. Why do I say so? Even a 2x surge didn’t get us a single driver! Mind you even at 2x surge it’s cheaper than the typical taxi (charge 400-500). Grab had no surge and an impressive list of drivers but with the exact same result.
Our hotel concierge’s bad English made a terrible situation untenable. They said taxi on signal. So we thought the taxi is at some signal enroute. Only after 25 min we realized that all they had done was switch on the “Taxi needed” signal. But being situated off the main road meant it was useless. The hotel’s own cars were booked.
What finally worked? Grab has two options : Grab taxi and Grab car. The latter is a sort of premium service (we got a spanking new Innova Crysta) at 2x the rate. In the end we got to the airport within 15 min of booking Grab Car but only after 1.5 hours of false starts. It could’ve been much worse.
Don’t be like me – trusting Uber with my intl vacation in a city where its yet to be established. Take the safe way out.