I Rented a Scooter in Chiang Mai and Nobody Told Me to Photograph It
Two hundred baht a day, no helmet included, and a deposit against a passport. The photo takes forty seconds and decides whether you lose a week.
The shop on the corner of the soi had scooters outside, a hand-painted price board, and a young man who handed me a key, a helmet, and a very reassuring smile. I paid for seven days in advance and rode out onto a main road in flip-flops.
Three days later the front wheel had a problem. I took it back, and the conversation that followed was in a tone I recognised from about four hundred other negotiations in this country: everything was my fault, the damage was pre-existing, and the deposit was going to be used.
The photograph takes forty seconds. It is the whole lesson of this article.
Last verified 5 September 2026.
What it actually costs
Two hundred to four hundred baht a day for a small scooter, and it varies genuinely by city, by season, and by how long you take it. Long rentals are cheaper per day. A week is normal. A month is where the price genuinely drops and the risk genuinely rises, because you now live with the thing.
There is usually a deposit, and it is usually your passport. This is the single most important fact in this post and it is almost never framed as the risk it is. A rental shop holding your passport has your ability to leave the country. That is leverage, and it is worth remembering the next time the bike has a scratch.
Ask for cash against a photocopy of the passport instead, and if they refuse, weigh it. Some shops will take the copy. Some will take a driver's licence. Some will take a cash deposit of a few thousand baht. All three are better than handing over the document that everything else in your trip depends on.
Insurance is the other thing to be clear about. Almost no rental shop includes meaningful insurance, and the third-party liability cover that a legally registered vehicle carries in Thailand frequently does not extend to a rental scooter, because the shop is not the registered owner in the way the law assumes. Assume you have no cover and ride accordingly.
Six checks at the counter, in this order
1. Photograph everything before you pay. The bike from both sides, the front, the back, the odometer reading, the fuel gauge, the underside if you want to be thorough. Forty seconds. With pictures, the argument is about facts. Without them, the argument is about a stranger's memory.
2. The brakes. Squeeze the front lever hard. It should not feel spongy. A soft front brake on a scooter with traffic in front of you is a serious problem, not a minor one, and a great many rental scooters have it.
3. The tyres. Look at the tread, and more usefully, look at the sidewalls for cuts and bulges, which is where rental bikes fail. Also push down hard on the handlebars and let go, and see whether the steering loosens.
4. The lights. Headlight, brake light, indicators, horn. The brake light is the one that will save you, because the vehicle behind you does not know you are about to stop.
5. The fuel level and what a full tank costs. Photograph the gauge. Gas stations are common in a city and scarce in the mountains, and the fuel policy differs between shops, so find out now whether you return it full.
6. Read the damage list. Ask for the existing scratches to be written down on the rental agreement and that you initial it. If the shop has no form, that is itself information.
The licensing and helmet part, briefly and seriously
You need an International Driving Permit with the motorcycle category on it, and you need it with your licence, not instead of it. This is covered in detail in our driving licence post and it is the part people skip. Police in Thailand do check, particularly after an accident, and the penalty is not a fine.
Wear a helmet, always, and fasten it. The law requires it for both rider and passenger, and enforcement is real enough that the police do stop people. More importantly: Thailand has one of the highest motorbike fatality rates in the world, and the single biggest predictor of whether you are the statistic is whether you were wearing one.
Buy a proper one rather than accepting the one on the bike. The helmets at rental shops vary from a genuinely new one to something that has clearly been through an incident. A decent open-face helmet is a few hundred baht and you will keep it longer than you keep the scooter.
The mistakes that are not about paperwork
Riding in flip-flops, which is how I started, is a bad idea for reasons that will be obvious the first time your foot is on the wrong side of the bike.
Riding in the rain on a scooter with no rain gear is how people end up in a clinic. It is a very cheap jacket and it is the highest-value thing you will buy in the trip.
Never ride after dark on a scooter you are not confident on. Thai night roads have poor lighting, unlit trucks parked on the shoulder, dogs, and a real problem with animals in the road. This is not timidity, it is the single biggest difference between a good trip and an expensive one.
And do not carry a passenger unless there are two helmets and the pillion footrests work.
When to skip the scooter entirely
If your trip is two days of sightseeing, you are better off with a driver. A car and driver for a day in Chiang Mai is in the region of two thousand to two thousand five hundred baht, which sounds like a lot until you price it against a week of fuel plus the risk plus the three hours a day of navigating unfamiliar junctions on the wrong side of the road.
You do not need to ride to have a good time in Thailand, and a lot of visitors who never touch a scooter have the best trips of all. The scooter is for people who want to be somewhere that public transport does not reach, and that is a real category, but it is a specific one rather than a default.
And if you do rent one, take the photographs. Everything else on this page is advice. That one is a fix.
