The best taxi app in China is not the one you think

Every guide to getting around China tells you to install DiDi. That advice is not wrong, and it is also not the thing that decides whether your trip goes smoothly.

The app is the easy part. The hard part is the thirty seconds when the car arrives and neither of you can confirm you have found each other.

What the three real options are

DiDi. Has an English interface and is what most visitors end up using. It links to an international card, though whether your particular card works depends on the region your account is registered in and on the card issuer, so try it before you are standing on a kerb at midnight. The in-app chat translates, which matters more than the map.

Amap (高德). The map app Chinese drivers themselves use. It has an English mode now, and ride-hailing lives inside it. The advantage: the driver is using the same map as the app that dispatched them, so the pickup point is not a translation of a pickup point — it is the same one.

The Alipay mini-program. If you already have Alipay set up with a foreign card, ride-hailing is one of its mini-programs, and it avoids installing another app. Convenient; slightly more clicks; the same underlying dispatch networks.

Any of the three will call a car. Which one you pick matters far less than the next part.

The part nobody warns you about

All three apps describe your destination with a name. "Grand Millennium Hotel." "West Lake scenic area." "Tianfu Square."

A driver does not navigate to a name. He navigates to an address, in characters, and often to a specific entrance of a building that has four of them. When the app pins a name and you cannot read the characters under it, you are asking him to solve a puzzle at 60 km/h.

Three failure modes follow, in order of how often they happen:

1. The pin is right and the entrance is wrong. Large hotels and stations have multiple vehicle entrances. The app drops you at one; your ticket is at another.
2. The name is local, not official. Small guesthouses and restaurants are known by a name that appears nowhere on the building.
3. The driver calls. He has one question — where exactly are you — and you cannot answer it in his language.

What actually fixes it

A card. Paper, or a screenshot, that shows the destination in large Chinese characters, with the pinyin underneath in case he reads it aloud to a colleague, and a QR code that opens the exact spot in Amap.

I built one because I got tired of passing my phone through a car window on a motorway: sinostay.com/tools/taxi-card. Type a destination, print or save the card, hand it over. No account, nothing to install, works for a hotel you have not booked yet.

Two more habits worth having:

• Screenshot the Chinese name of your hotel from the booking confirmation before you leave the room. Not the English name. The characters.
• For stations, add the exit or the square. "Hangzhou East Railway Station" is a building the size of an airport; the difference between the north and south drop-off is twenty minutes on foot. All 1,269 stations in the dataset carry their Chinese name for exactly this reason.

The short version

Install DiDi or Amap, link a card, and test it once in a city you know before you rely on it. Then solve the real problem: make sure that when the car pulls up, the driver can read where you are going without asking you a question.

Everything else — which app, which button, which promo code — is noise.

All of this sits on sinostay, alongside the hotel, payment and rail details that took me longer to work out than they should have.