Places and stories shared by the taxi driver while moving through the city, ‘thicken’ places adding meaning and authenticity. We propose that this thickening is a kind of ‘placemaking from below’, and as such, our work is critical of an orthodoxy in tourism which privileges the ‘thin’ authorised tourism discourse of official destination management efforts, social media gloss and brochure narratives. Our research focuses on taxi drivers' local knowledge and histories. We show how they and other tourism workers offer a source of meanings emanating from local and lived narratives otherwise inaccessible to tourists in enclavic destination zones. We thus encourage a celebration of the marginalised voices of myriad service workers, and their important contribution to authentic tourism and placefulness.