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Illegal one-day tour in Beijing tricks millions of tourists
The National Day holiday is just a couple of months away. By then, many tourists from home and abroad will come to Beijing for a visit as usual. However, these people might not know that they might be taken in by the illegal one-day tour in Beijing, the Beijing News reported.
Here is a set of alarming figures released by the Beijing Municipal Tourism Bureau: Every year, about 60 million people come to visit Beijing as individual tourists. However, 16% of them have been tricked by people promoting the illegal one-day tour. That is to say that every day, about tens of thousands of tourists are taken in by illegal tourism agencies or tour guides, who wait mostly along the tour route from Tian'anmen Square to North Beijing, trying to persuade people to get on their tour buses.
At many tourist sights in Beijing, there is a group of people distributing ads brochures about illegal one-day tour to tourists every day. When tourists come to them, they will transfer the tourists to the illegal one-day tour organizers. In every transaction, they can earn 30-80 yuan as commission fees. In fact, all people who distribute brochures about the illegal one-day tour work for some criminal groups, said Yang Quan, chief of the Beijing Municipal Tourism Bureau Law Enforcement Department.
Since these people control the individual tour market, their existence affects the business of legal tourism agencies. Due to the limited profits and tourist number, China International Travel Service and China Youth Travel Service, the two largest travel agents in China, and many other large tourism agencies have had to retreat from individual tour market. Some legal tourism agencies have been criticized by the China National Tourism Administration for paying money to illegal one-day tour organizers for their customers.
The illegal tour ads distributors, who control the individual tour market, "sell" their customers at several dozen yuan per person. The illegal organizers, who have "bought" the customers, then try to make profit by raising the service price, lowering their service quality or taking commission fees through shopping. Sometimes they even change the tour itinerary without asking permission from tourists.
Why is it so difficult for Beijing to eradicate the illegal one-day tour? According to Gu Xiaoyuan, deputy director of Beijing Municipal Tourism Bureau, when China first carried put the Reform and Opening-up, Chinese government left the individual tour market to some individual businesspeople. Only ten years later, were Chinese legal tourism agencies allowed to enter into this market. However, the individual businesspeople, who had stepped into the market earlier, later grew to become the illegal one-day tour organizers.
"In every chain of the individual tour market, they are a lot more experienced than legal tourism agencies," said Gu. That explains why, although Chinese government has made great efforts to crack down the illegal one-day tour market, these efforts have often proved futile.
Source: China news
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