If you think your late evening flight into Suvarnabhumi Airport (BKK) is going to be lonely experience, fret not. Apparently, plenty of flights get into Bangkok rather late. I thought my 11:35 PM arrival time would mean a very quiet immigration and baggage process, but no! Even past midnight, BKK was bustling with the sort of activity you see during midday at a domestic airport in the States. Our flight’s baggage carousel was right next to a flight from Hong Kong. Hello, my people!
Because BKK is still so busy into the morning hours, getting a taxi to your hotel in Bangkok is no trouble. The taxi queue outside of arrivals levels was healthy. Passengers punch in their information at the kiosk. It then spits out a ticket, with which you show to the next available taxi driver. I’ve read a lot of stories of taxi (and tuk-tuk) drivers ripping foreigners off in Thailand, but apparently the airport queue is highly regulated. Drivers are incentivized to treat airport customers fairly, lest they get banned from this lucrative route.
The government can’t risk harming the country’s reputation right off the jump!
I did not take a regular taxi to get to my hotel. Thanks to pre-supplied information, I downloaded the Grab app before leaving America. Grab is essentially the Uber of Thailand (and a few other Southeast Asian countries), and super convenient. It accepts foreign credit cards, so you wouldn’t even need to get cash right away at the airport. At BKK there’s a dedicated Grab pickup zone on the same level as the taxis. At 1:00 AM in the morning, it was lit (to borrow a parlance from the kids). It was so surprisingly busy that there was surge pricing, and my driver actually directed me to a different pickup point.
It ended up costing about 700 Baht to go from the airpot to the Phaya Thai district - where my hotel is. Had it been during “normal” hours, I would have taken the airport rail link. It would have cost only 45 Baht to get to the same Phaya Thai district.
Rush hour.