Hong Kong tour guide abuses tourists for spending too little
*:D*
The New Paper | Mon, Jul 19 2010
*Hong Kong tour guide abuses tourists for spending too little*
*She threatened to lock up their hotel rooms and cancelled part of their tour.*
YOU are all cheapskates. That’s what a Hong Kong tour guide called a group of China tourists for not spending enough on a shopping trip.
A video clip of the tourist guide’s rant is now widely viewed after it was uploaded onto the Internet. More than a dozen TV stations in China had also played the clip over the last few days, reported Hong Kong’s The Standard.
Hong Kong’s Travel Industry Council chairman Michael Wu Siu Ieng told The Standard on Thursday that investigators know who the guide is and will meet to look further into the incident.
The female guide, called Ah Zhen, told the group, which apparently enjoyed subsidised air ticket prices, that there’s no free lunch in the world. While she ranted in fluent Mandarin on the bus, a tourist took the video surreptitiously.
She compared this group of 24 tourists with another group which spent 10 times more. She said: “There was another group of tourists who didn’t even come out after two hours, and they spent HK$137,000 (S$24,000).” For a group of 24, you spent only HK$13,000. How could you just walk out of the shop when the time wasn’t even up?”
She also claimed that she had not seen something as “shameful” in her eight years as a guide. She added: “How can there be free lunches in this world? Think about it, your tour costs only 1,000 yuan (S$200), which isn’t even enough for your air ticket from Guangzhou.”
She went on:”We don’t do this for charity. Let me be responsible for charity. I donated 10,500 yuan for Sichuan earthquake victims.”
She added: “It’s okay for you to stay poor at home, but when you travel outside, don’t be like this. Why did you bother to come to Hong Kong? If you don’t pay for it now, you will have to pay for it in your next lives.”
The person who took the video said on a China online forum that he joined the Hong Kong tour on March 25 and the incident left him feeling bad.
*Threats *
He added that after the tirade, the guide cancelled a trip to popular temple Wong Tai Sin and took the group to a watch shop.
“Don’t tell me you don’t need (to shop). Later, are you going to say you don’t need to eat, and don’t need to stay at a hotel? I will lock up the hotel rooms tonight. You didn’t spend enough.”
After the video was uploaded onto YouTube and other video-sharing websites in China, some netizens responded by saying they will not dare to visit Hong Kong.
This is not the first case of tourist harrassment. Last month, Apple Daily reported a case where an elderly man from China died after a quarrel with a bogus tour guide during a shopping stop.
Earlier this month, four people from Henan complained they were abandoned in Guangzhou after refusing to pay an extra HK$2,000 for not shopping in HongKong during a tour.
Tourism sector legislator Paul Tse Wai Chun urged the authorities to think about tough penalties. He said: “It’s not enough if only the travel agent is penalised. Sometimes they just give guidelines to tour guides and leave it to the guides whether to follow them or not.”
*Copyright ©2010 Singapore Press Holdings Ltd*
Generally it sounds funny. To be more specific and particular, it is god damn SERIOUS regarding cheap package creations. In this Hong Kong classic case, you will see there is lack of responsibility between the Agency & the tour guide; how to react. Ah Zhen is unbelievable. This knocks me a thought of our Myanmar guides whining when having no tips or few upon clients’ departure. Damn!!
On Tue, Jul 20, 2010 at 12:05 PM, Thomas Lattwrote:
*:D*
2010/7/20 Nyi Nyi ®
It’s really unbelievable here. People in Hong Kong(generally speaking) are unreasonably materialistic and extremely money-oriented. I’m proud of being who we are and we should remain that way. We are a beautiful people. I know many tourguides who paid for their broke clients’ airport tax (I included:) .
If tipping is under 100 $ and shopping is less than 1000 $ , let’s lock them up . This is ဂိုက္တာ၀န္အေရး ( ၃) ပါး ထဲမွာ ထည္.ရမယ္
ကိုညီ စတင္အျကံ ျပု သူ G/0785
2010/7/20 Nyi Nyi ®
Ko Thomas, Can you please send me the link to the article? And perhaps the link to the youtube clip as well. I’m gonna forward it to my local HK friends and find out how they’d react
Here you go https://mail.google.com/mail/?shva=1#inbox/129ee5971bad3d6e
Sorry for wring link (i did many copy-and-paste-stuffs today
) http://forums.sgclub.com/singapore/hong_kong_tour_286559.html
On Tue, Jul 20, 2010 at 4:32 PM, Thomas Latt wrote:
Thanks bro.
*Dodgy tour guides haunt Hong Kong*
Unscrupulous tour guides are back in the news, this time in Hong Kong where a video surfaced of a guide screaming at a group of Chinese tourists and demanding that they spend more money.
*AFP/Relax News* reported that mainland China’s official tourism body, in response recent incidents, this week issued a warning to travellers planning a trip to Hong Kong
At one stage in the video the tour guide, Ah Zhen, reminds the tourists that she has arranged everything for the trip and “If you don’t pay me back in this life, you’ll still have to pay me back in your next life”.
She also says, “Spend more, you’ll be happier… don’t tell me you don’t need [to buy more], next you’ll be telling me you don’t need to eat at meal time. I will lock you out of your hotel rooms because you don’t need them [either].”
These cheapie tours are not confined to Hong Kong. Australia has grappled with the problem of tours in which Chinese pay very little for their holiday while the tour guide makes his or her cut from commissions obtained from certain shops.
The size of these commissions is related to the amount of money the Chinese tourists spend on souvenirs and other personal items.
In one case, a tour guide tried to charge a group of Chinese tourists to walk on Sydney’s Bondi beach.
Tour operators in Shanghai have apparently claimed tours to Hong Kong are down 30 percent this year due to a spate of similar controversies.
The Hong Kong government is looking into taking control of the licensing system for tour guides and cracking down on “zero-charge” packages in the wake of recent scandals
Secretary for Commerce and Economic Development, Rita Lau Ng, said free tours and lax regulations for tour guides are at the root of the problems besetting the industry.
Meanwhile, tour guide Ah Zhen said she has suffered emotionally since the release of the video that shows her shouting at the mainland tour group.
“My feelings have been very unstable,” she told a local newspaper. “It may have just been a little incident but it has been blown up into a big controversy.”
By Ian Jarrett
On Tue, Jul 20, 2010 at 4:38 PM, Ko Htike wrote: