Somebody in your group is going to eat about €60 on the first night and never mention it. It happens in the twenty minutes between landing and the front door, and the cause is a sentence everyone agrees with: "we'll just get taxis".
Here is what "we'll just get taxis" means for eight people with luggage. A normal saloon car takes four passengers on paper and three once you have added a large suitcase each. So eight people is three cars, not two. Three cars means three drivers taking three routes, arriving up to twenty minutes apart, and three separate fares that somebody has to reassemble later from memory.
The fares are the small problem. The reassembling is the real one. Two people paid by card, one paid cash, one driver would not take card at all and a fourth person covered them. By dinner nobody remembers the amounts and the group quietly decides it is not worth sorting out. That is the €60 from the top of this page, and the person carrying it is usually the person who was most organised about everything else.
The maths that actually decides it
Compare per group, not per person. A metro ride at €2 a head looks unbeatable next to a €40 van until you count what it costs the group: two changes, a flight of stairs each, and the twenty minutes of standing around that a tired group turns into an argument about whether we should have got taxis.
The comparison worth making is roughly:
- Public transport wins on price whenever the group is small, awake, and travelling light. It stops winning the moment somebody has a suitcase they cannot lift.
- Taxis on arrival win for four people or fewer. One car, one fare, one person pays and the group settles later.
- A booked van wins above five people, and it wins more the later the flight lands. One vehicle, one price agreed before you left home, one payment to split.
The last one is the one groups skip, usually because booking a transfer feels like the sort of thing package holidays do. For six to eight people arriving together it is normally cheaper than the cars you would otherwise take, and the fixed price is worth more than the difference. Nobody negotiates at 1am. Nobody discovers the airport surcharge afterwards.
The partner we point people at for this is Kiwitaxi. You put in the airport and the address and it quotes a fixed price for a vehicle that fits the group. They track the flight and include a window of free waiting time; check what that window is on your booking, because a long delay can still cost extra.
That link is an affiliate link. You pay their normal price and Billy earns a commission on the booking, which is how the app stays free. We would rather tell you that here than bury it.
Whoever pays, pay once
Whatever you choose, the thing that saves the evening is having one payer for the whole ride. One person books, one person is owed a number everybody can see, and the split happens later without anyone reconstructing who handed the driver a twenty.
If you are already splitting the trip in an app, put the transfer in the moment it is paid, while you are still in the car. The one you log four days later gets logged as "taxi, about 40?".
Where this advice falls apart: short hops in cities with cheap, plentiful taxis. In Lisbon or Mexico City, three cars from the airport can cost less than a booked van and take ten minutes to organise. We do not have a clean rule for where the line sits. It moves with the city, the hour and how much luggage the group insisted on bringing.