Behind…

Behind…

Written by Judy Feng Liu

As the winter is gone, more and more Chinese people like to go away travelling. However, there are a lot of people feel bad when they travel. Why is this? This is because they choose very cheap travel agencies to book their trip away.

On the surface, although choosing cheap travel agencies may seem very cost-effective at the time, the final result usually turns out to be the opposite to their expectations. The initial price they offer is much less than their cost. So, these agencies have to find other ways to get their cost back and earn more money.

Those other ways include shopping. Usually they will make deal with the shop keepers before they travel by sending tourists to those shops to buy. And then, they can get a certain percentage from the shop keepers. So, when the visitors arrive at the travelling destination, they will arrange the visitors to go shopping first.

If the tourists buy nothing or do not spend a certain amount, the travel agency won’t take them to the designated spots. Even in Hongkong, a very extreme case of this happened. It said that a group of tourists didn’t buy in the designated shops, so the tour guide took them to a large cemetery and kept them there for several hours.

Another way is drinking tea at the tea houses (Usually it happens with foreign tourists).Sometimes, some tour guide who charge a low fee do so, obviously low. So, they will take the tourists to the tea houses to drink tea. The tourists will find out that the bill is ridiculously expensive when they leave the tea house. But, it was too late. In this case, the tour guide generally can get a certain profit from the tea house after they leave.

Of course, this is not to say that all of the guides who offer lower price will do this because some of them just want to practice their foreign languages with native people. So, they don’t care about the price. If you want to find someone who just wants to practice their languages, you must not care about the quality of service they offer you.

So, how to find out whether a guide’s price is reasonably priced? It’s very simple, the only thing you need to do is to compare the offer to the cost of living in that place. If the cost of living is higher than the cost of living there, it means it is for a reason.