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Thread: Tell Others Your Travel Traps here!
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[quote=MIRANDAZHAO,244907]On the first day, after leaving the bus to go to Tiennamen Square, we walked several blocks before Ying asked if anyone wanted to go to a bathroom. Many people did, so he directed them back to a bathroom where thevy were charged three dollars US for the privilege. A few tour participants were smart enough to "negotiate" down to a dollar for the potty privilege. But wouldn't it have been gracious of the tour leader to walk them back and negotiate a group price? The Regent tour supposedly used 5 star hotels yet only two of them were even listed in the five guidebooks I checked. At these "five star hotels," you could not get more than one clean towel a day without begging the hotel. At the King Wing Hot Spring Hotel in Beijing it took four calls to housekeeping and the manager to get a second clean towel for a second shower after a hot day of touring. "Tomorrow" they said. And "you have towels." It was true. We had towels. But they were wet and dirty. Later, a local person explained to me that the signs in the lobby of each hotel with five stars did not mean that was their international rating. It merely meant they were a member of a professional organization much like a chamber of commerce. All the meals were supposedly included the Regent Tours China tour. Yet, after the orientation, suddenly dinners in Hong Kong were not included. And one day we had a "picnic" at the Summer Palace in Beijing. Nice idea, great concept. But the picnic for 38 included one loaf of unsliced bread, crackers, bananas, lychee fruit, 12 cookies, and some fish sausage which almost no one except the guide ate. He claimed he had also bought yogurt and chicken sausages, but he left them in his car. (Perhaps if he had an assistant, they could have retrieved them or bought more.) One night we begged him to change the schedule so we would be able to climb the Great Wall in the morning when it was cooler. He reassured our entire table of 8 that he would do so. Yet when we got back on the bus, he had reverted to "his" original schedule. Each day, we hoped to return to the hotel to shower and relax before dinner. Yet Ying always decided to go directly on to dinner. Everyone was hot, tired, and sweaty. Maybe this sounds like too democratic a suggestion, but maybe we could have voted to see if the group would rather return to the hotel to rest before dinner or not. Actually, the most interesting thing I discovered on this trip was what it must be like to live in a Communist country where all information is controlled by a central source. Our guide would tell us plans were changed because the government wanted to use a certain hall and we had to come another day. Why did the government only give him 24 hours notice? Does this happen to other tourists? And how could we check? He claimed we could not go to the Great Wall in the morning because the road only went one way and then we would miss the Cloisonné Factory (which I call a guide store).[/quote]
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