How To Find Out How Much A Taxi Will Cost, Ahead of Time, While Traveling - Your Mileage May Vary

When you're traveling and need to get from Point A to Point B, it's sometimes helpful to know ahead of time how much that's going to cost. That's especially true with taxis and ridesharing, which don't have static, printed prices like public transport does, to help ensure you're not getting ripped off. And when you're trying to figure out which form of transportation you should take, price is often an important factor in the pros and cons of each mode of transportation.

Ridesharing companies like Uber & Lyft have price calculators on their respective websites (here's Uber's & here's Lyft 's), and you can usually find the price of public transportation in any given city with just a bit of Googling/Binging/Dogpiling/Yahooing, etc. (AltaVista, anyone? Anyone?) But taxis are a little harder because you may not know the name of the local taxi companies to lookup. Even if they have a web page, they may not have a price calculator. So finding out how much a taxi will cost has often been a little bit of a surprise.

Until now.

Taxi Fare Finder is a website that can calculate the estimated fare for a taxi ride almost anywhere in the world. It has prices for more than 1000 international localities in nearly 70 counties, covering thousands of cities.

It's really simple to use...all you have to do is go to www.taxifarefinder.com, choose the city you're in (or choose from a [relatively limited] list of airports of colleges), and type in where you are and where you want to go.

With this information, Taxi Finder can tell you an estimation of how much your ride will be.

Here's an example. Let's say you've just landed at LaGuardia Airport and want to get to the New York Marriott Marquis Hotel in Times Square.

Here's the route you can expect the driver to take (approximately, of course):

Here's how much Taxi Fare Finder says it will cost:

You can see that they even give you a link to see how much Uber, Lyft, and other rides will cost, so you can compare.

Your fare may not be 100% perfect because other factors can go into the price, such as weather, traffic patterns and even your driver's driving habits. But under normal driving conditions, it should be good to give you a rough idea of how much to expect your ride to cost.

Taxi Fare Finder also gives you some helpful info such as special notes about your intended ride, the approximate price breakdown, the phone number of the taxi company, and other, not so useful but kind of interesting stuff (cuz you've always wanted to know how long it would take to walk from LGA to Times Square, and how many calories that would be, right?)

To continue to grow and improve, Taxi Finder is open to letting taxi and limo companies include their information on TFF's website (well, and advertise, too...for a price LOL).

In playing around with TFF, it seems like a useful tool for those who travel and want an idea of how much taxi fares will be in that area. However, it's not without a few faults:

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• I picked LaGuardia Airport out of the air. LGA is not an international airport. Yet, the 2 other airports in the NYC area, JFK and EWR, which are international airports, are not listed under Airports. You can still get a quote if you type in EWR in "Enter where you are..." but I would think 2 large, international airports would be included in a list of airports.
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• TFF has an app for iPhone but not for any other phone OS.

Those aspects set aside, I've bookmarked the page so we have easy access to it when traveling.