Having just spent a week in a European city that does have Uber, I was reminded how easy it is to have access at your phone fingertips to get a ride. Not only is it fast and simple but you don’t have to worry about having cash to pay for it.

As a foreigner, long-term living in Florence, it is one of our passtimes to compare the services in Florence to the services we have available at home. It has constantly baffled me that taxis in Florence DO NOT automatically offer the option to pay with a credit or debit card. I caught myself for years complaining – “Well…back home, we have had credit card machines in taxis forever”. Don’t get me wrong, I live here and I love it here!

I have been using the It Taxi App for over a year now and I am totally converted. However, as I landed in Pisa last week on Monday in the middle of the night I finally added my credit card details into the App. Why did it take me so long, I don’t know.

Firstly I was inspired by the fact that I used Uber all the time in Krakow. And secondly my biggest problem that night was that I was arriving in Florence at 2am WITHOUT ANY EURO CASH!

Adding my credit card details was not as easy as I expected it to be. Italian credit cards have lots of layers of security. However adding my Paypal account which is attached to my credit card was super simple.

I learnt something else new in the process. You can’t book a taxi on the App to a random location, like the bus stop where the airport shuttle arrives. It has to be a home address. I also learnt that even if I call a taxi, I can still pay the ride using the App. Not quite Uber but once you get the hang of it, so simple.

You can use you It Taxi App to book a taxi right now or my favorite function is the night before a trip I can pre-book a taxi for a specific date and time. It should geolocate to where you are because it seems that the app is driven by google maps but you can also manually insert your address for your departure and arrival location.

My App has also defaulted to the language I use my phone in, which is English, making everything easy to understand.

And lastly, It Taxi works all over Italy, not just in Florence!

Happy taxiing!

Cover Photo by Peter Kasprzyk on Unsplash