Why Grab and Gojek drivers fear Bali’s ‘no-go zones’

An unseen battle between ride-hailing giants and traditional village councils is forcing tourists to pay inflated rates – or walk

“I cannot come to you,” Katie Williams was told, seconds after her Grab driver had accepted her request for a ride in Canggu. “I cannot come to you. You need to come meet me.”

Williams, an Australian tourist in her mid-thirties, explained through the app that her elderly parents struggled to walk very far in the hot Bali sun. The driver’s reply was blunt: “It’s too dangerous. I cannot come.”

After two more cancellations, she eventually relented and paid a local driver twice the original fare.

Williams only discovered afterwards that her hotel sat inside one of Bali’s informal “no-go zones” for app-based drivers: invisible front lines in a transport war that most tourists never see coming.

Looking back, she called the episode “simply an inconvenience”. More than anything, she and her parents were left feeling confused, she said.

But there is: what may seem like a minor irritation at first glance obscures a long-running contest between the algorithmic convenience of ride-hailing giants such as Grab and Gojek and the power of Bali’s banjar, village community councils that still govern much of daily life on the island.