This post is also available in: Română (Romanian)
Recently we spent 10 days in Italy, a kind of vacation. Of course I still worked a bit during it (yeah, whoever knows me knows I can’t fully stop), but I still enjoyed the beach, took breaks, worked in the evenings sometimes. It was a nice period overall. But I want to tell you about one episode that happened to us there, because I think it’s a good story.
When we arrived in Italy, we had transport from the airport to our accommodation included for free through booking.com. We used it, obviously, since we got it for free anyway. When it was time to leave though, we decided to take the train to the airport. There were two trains we could catch to get there on time and without stress: one earlier and one later. We picked, naturally, the safer one — the 9 AM train.
We got to the station about 15 minutes early. We’re standing there waiting, and at some point they announce that our train got cancelled. Right at that moment, a guy on the platform starts shouting that actually all the trains are stopped, cancelled, none are coming. And that he has a shuttle van outside and he’ll take us to the airport for free. Free, he kept saying. The platform emptied out in a minute, everyone rushed to the street toward the van.
Except once we got outside, to the van, the story suddenly changed: it wasn’t free anymore. Same price whether you were going into town or to the airport, he said, doesn’t matter, it’s the same for everyone. When I heard that, some red flags went up in my head. Something didn’t add up — if he said free at first, like he was some official from the train station, why does it suddenly cost money now, like any other transport? It smelled like a well-run scheme: empty the platform with the news that “everything’s cancelled,” then load the scared, rushed people into a paid van.
I told Cata: let’s not rush into this, let’s go back to the platform and wait for the next train, which was coming in an hour. I checked the public transport app for trains in Italy, and the next train already showed as departed from its origin station, already on its way toward us. From that point on it basically couldn’t be cancelled anymore, since it was already moving. So we waited.
And, surprise (not really), the train came exactly like the app showed. It wasn’t true that “all the trains are stopped.” We made it to the airport on time, without paying a cent for the story-shuttle. (I’ll tell you in a future post about the ride from the station to the airport too, because we had some adventures there as well.)
The takeaway I’m left with from this whole thing: it’s not just in Romania that we have people who want to scam you and pull some money out of you. Turns out Italians are pretty good at it too. In the end I guess we all have the same scammer blood running through our veins, it’s just that this guy found his own way to make quick money off tourists who are scared and in a rush to catch their flight.
I’ll post a picture of the shuttle below too, in case anyone recognizes this guy — so he knows it’s not nice to lie to people to take their money.
Thanks for reading this far. Talk to you in the next post!
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