Grab driver ignored route and Grab safety alert asked if I wanted police — am I overreacting?
Yesterday I had a really disturbing experience in Bangkok and I honestly still don’t know what to think about it. I’m a young European woman traveling alone, and the driver was a man, which honestly made the situation feel even more intimidating for me.
I booked a Grab from my job in the Bang Na industrial area to my condo in the lower Phrom Phong area, which is a route I take very often, have gone this way at least 60times, so I know the normal way home quite well. Instead of taking the normal route, the driver suddenly started driving in the completely wrong direction toward and past Suvarnabhumi airport.
At first I thought maybe traffic or something, but I quickly realized he was ignoring the navigation completely and starting to change it manually. I questioned him multiple times and he only said it would be “faster,” even though the route became around 20 km longer and the ETA also increased.
What really scared me was that Grab itself suddenly sent me a safety alert saying: “We noticed your ride is taking a different route” and asking if I wanted them to contact the police. I have taken Grab many times in Thailand and have literally never received anything like that before.
The driver also became very tense and quiet when I kept questioning him. I eventually got so uncomfortable that I jumped out when the car slowed down near a large parking area a few kilometers past the airport because I no longer felt safe staying inside the vehicle.
Now people around me are kind of acting like I overreacted because “you can technically get home that way too.” But I feel like that completely misses the point — it wasn’t just another road, it was a completely different direction, much longer, ignored navigation, and even Grab’s own system flagged it as suspicious.
Am I overreacting here, or would this scare other people too?
Edit: I asked the driver to stop before jumping out of the car, he did not listen. When I left the car we were driving very slowly because of traffic. The area I ended up in when I left the car was a big parking lot 2km from the airport. Luckily there was an airport shuttle bus at the parking area so I took that and went to the airport.