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Q: Chinese tours, why?
I make no bones about it, I dislike what passes for tourism in China. The best expression I've heard from a tour guide? 'The Chinese like new and fake; foreigners like old and real'. How true is this in your experience?
11 years 50 weeks ago in Transport & Travel - China
It's pretty accurate I guess. Well I took a tour from a chinese group through thailand and it wasn't so bad. I'm sure everyone like old and traditional......the new fake stuff I have no interest in at all. I'd say your partly correct!
The thing I hate with Chinese tours is stopping at various shops and herding everyone through just so the tour guide can make some commission. The worst one we had was a coach tour to the great wall and the ming tombs. The wall was not so bad but we drove past the ming tombs and stopped about a couple of kilometers down the road for shopping. We got back on the coach and drove past the tombs again, when I got my wife to ask the tour guide when we were going to visit the tombs she said " we see those already, drive by". Turned out she just wanted to add a third shop onto the days itinery and cut out actually visiting the tombs. Needless to say she was not happy with my comments. Since then I will not go with any Chinese travel group, prefer to book everything myself.
steve0sha:
experienced same sort of thing, 1 sight , rest tea making or pottery making with shop that has over inflated price sfor everything. At the end of the trip, the driver was not happy with tips and would not take us back, to which everyone took the tip back and caught a metro for 2 quai.
the tour guide gets a piece of everything sold at the shops that they stop at
Honestly I like the tours if I have someone coming to visit me. Seeing something like the Ming Tombs is fun once, but afterwards, I'm ready to get out of there is 10 mins. The tours not only makes me stay long enough that my guest can actually take time to take his/her pictures, but then it turn that 2 hour trip into a whole days worth of entertainment so he/she can go back and talk about how they got to see how jade is carve, or a tea ceremony, or "traditional" Chinese medicine (where everyone is discovered to have some problem or another).
So it takes care of all the tourist stuff in one day, so I can show them more of the enjoyable non-tourist places.
Plus I get to make fun of them for buying all the stupid overpriced crap at those stops.
