A downtown Vancouver hotel manager is adding his voice to the chorus calling for more transportation options amid the city’s holiday taxi crunch.
After a particularly busy weekend, Rosewood Hotel Georgia managing director Philip Meyer took to Twitter to vent his frustration about guests left in the lurch with no way home.
“What happens when a taxi company sells….let’s say 100 taxi vouchers to get guests home safely from the office Christmas party,” he wrote.
“Now when they come to actually use them and there are no cabs to be found…do they get a refund?”
Taxi vouchers are not generally paid for up front, but rather are charged to corporate accounts after they are redeemed.
But speaking with CKNW’s Steele & Drex on Monday, Meyer said that doesn’t make them any more useful for guests unable to find a ride.
“They’re holding these vouchers and saying, ‘Well, what do we do with this?’ And quite honestly, it’s a wasted piece of paper at that time of night.”
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Amid Metro Vancouver’s holiday transportation shortage, Meyer said the hotel has resorted to drastic steps to find cabs for their customers.
That includes sending extra staff out onto the street to physically flag cabs down.
“We are on the corner of Howe and Georgia, and we had staff on Dunsmuir, on Georgia and on Howe, just trying to look for passing cabs to direct them into the hotel,” he said.
“Because at some point, cab companies just don’t answer the phone anymore. I mean they stop answering the phone when the volume is so high they just can’t deal with the demand.”
This past weekend, the lack of cabs left some of the hotel’s holiday party guests taking matters into their own hands.
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In one case, a pair of drivers saw the crowd of frustrated revelers leaving a party and offered them rides.
“And they just loaded up their car with two couples each and took them home, strangers that they’d just met. People were almost crying that they couldn’t get a ride home,” he said.
Meyer is calling on the province to step on the gas pedal when it comes to approving ride-hailing services like Uber — the absence of which he described as mystifying to the hotel’s out-of-town guests.
Ahead of this year’s election, both the BC Liberals and NDP had pledged to have ride-hailing in place in time for the 2017 holiday season, but the NDP walked that back after taking power.
The NDP government has instead commissioned a report on the taxi industry due early next year and said a ride-hailing roll out likely wouldn’t be in place before next fall.
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