Sympathy for Ah Zhen
July 28th, 2010 atam Posted in General | 1 Comment »
It’s not right to pressure people into shopping and most certainly not right to harangue people, but enough villifying of the tour guide Ah Zhen, whose rant against her tourist charges became viral on YouTube.
After all, she’s just a symbol of an industry that’s built on mutual exploitation. Think about it: how much are those outraged guys at the top of the Tourism Commission paid for wasting taxpayers’ money on extravagant overseas promotions, and how much is Ah Zhen paid? In the former case, it’s a nice salary plus bonus; in the latter case, no basic salary and only tips and commissions based on how much shopping her charges rack up. Now, because the former want to haul her over the coals, the latter may lose her job.
Exploitation is rampant at all levels of the tourism industry. The government builds so-called ‘tourist attractions’ so visitors have somewhere to go for the obligatory photos that show they’ve been there, done that. The hotels, mostly foreign chains with head offices elsewhere, make their money and repatriate most of it back to home base. The tour guides make sure their charges shop so they can get a nice commission. The shops and stalls that cater to tourists sell utterly useless trinkets and ’souvenirs’ that they take home to placate friends and relatives or simply to stash somewhere as a record of a trip abroad.
Since time immemorial people have travelled, to learn about foreign cultures at first hand and broaden their horizon, and many still do. But since the days when Henry Ford gave his auto workers days off so they’d have a reason for buying his Model-T, so they could drive around and see the sights or whatever, travel has been systematically packaged into an industry that exploits people’s wish to get away from the toil they suffer through the regular work week.
The arrangement suits employers just fine: they can push their employees to the limit and, instead of complaints about long working hours, office politics and poor health, the latter’s energy is diverted to dreams of a holiday overseas.
So people get themselves even more tired spending hours hunting for a bargain tour, packing and unpacking, sitting around – and shopping, of course – at airports; and being herded around from one ‘tourist attraction’ to the next – starting at 6:00 am sharp! Then, having spent their hard-earned savings tiring themselves out, they’re back at their desks, labouring for the wage packet that will enable them to do it all over again. What fun.
July 29th, 2010 at 7:38 am
We have heard the top management of the tourism industry saying that the major problems are:
1. the zero or negative profit tour;
2. the touring company cannot control the tour guides
I think they are all wrong and they said it because they want to hide the real picture.
1. There is no way to stop the zero or negative profit tour because it starts from the source. The HK tour operators are still making the same amount. If there is a law in place to stop the source charging less for its cost, the rebate will be disguised as cash back or gift voucher etc. So there is no way to control it.
2. The employers (tour operators) has the control over tour guide. It is not effective because they are governing themselves. How hard will this be?
We heard different voice about minimum wages and this is going to fix the problem which is the quality of tour guide. If there is a rule that tour operators can only employed registered tour guide who have to go through more difficult examinations and set a minimum wage. The tour guides don’t have to worry about pressing the tourists to shop for their income and they have to retain their licence otherwise they are losing their jobs.
The quality control of tour guides rests in the hands of the government not in the tourism industry. The tourism industry knows that which is why we have Functional Constituencies. The problems of Functional Constituencies do not stop here.