Taxi Careem - it’s like Uber
Driving towards the impressive fortress of al-Ukaidir.
Careem - an Uber subsidiary - has been operating in Baghdad since 2018 and has been life-changing in terms of offering safe and reliable city transportation that can be used even without any Arabic language skills, as long as you know roughly where you want to go.
It operates for set - and very fair - prices, negating the need for tiresome fare haggling. However, during busy times or if you are in an area dense with unmoving traffic, it can still be quicker to hail a taxi off the street.
The Careem app clearly identifies drivers and their vehicles, and a post-journey ratings system enables this to be monitored. It also has quite strict codes of conduct for drivers, including regarding conversation, as Careem drivers are not supposed to talk to passengers beyond destination details unless the passenger initiates this. Cars are generally clean and modern, and drivers usually polite, professional and respectful.
As usual with taxis, we advise ladies travelling alone to sit in the back, in keeping with local conventions.
You can download the Careem app on any smartphone and make a simple account (there is an English language option). When you order a taxi through the app, if you don’t know where your destination is, you can skip that part and explain to the driver when he arrives. You can also call someone at your destination and hand the phone to the driver.
The app identifies your current location (it's usually pretty accurate) and sends a car there, giving you the estimated arrival time and the driver’s details, including name, car colour and vehicle registration. You can track the car’s progress towards you on the app.
If the driver can’t find you, he usually phones you, or gives you a missed call. If you don’t speak Arabic and can’t communicate, ask the nearest Iraqi to help. Although hotel staff or a cafe waiter might be ideal, in our experience, any Iraqi will be happy to help. They will speak to the driver for you, and direct him in.
You pay in cash at the end of the journey, and it’s preferable to have smaller notes (IQD10,000 and IQD 5,000) to hand. If neither you or the driver has the exact right money, any change due will be credited to your Careem account and will be automatically deducted from your next ride.
In countless journeys, we’ve only had one bad experience, where everything went wrong. The driver had a huge row with a petrol attendant at a garage, managed to get spectacularly lost and then kept pulling over in a dingy suburb to ask strangers where the destination was. Finally, we arrived (by us guiding him in with a map), resentfully paid the bill and slammed out of the car, only to discover later that he had logged us as a non-paying customer - what cheek!
Careem dealt with our complaint professionally, but the lesson we learned from this was not to leave the vehicle until the driver had tapped in our payment details on their version of the app, which they almost always do - very clearly - in front of you.
Airport option
You can use Careem to get to Baghdad International Airport for your departing flight. However, a normal Careem taxi will only be able to take you to the outer precinct of the airport - the Abu ibn Firnas roundabout - from where you will need to take an airport minibus into the actual airport.
Careem also apparently now operates a proper door-to-door airport service which, we understand, uses one of the official airport taxi firms. We have yet to try this out but, when we do, we will be sure to write about it. We asked one Careem driver about it and he said he thought this service, which would take you right to the airport doors, was around IQD 45,000.
