True, but if the same thing happened to you who would you blame more, the Thai hotelier or the Chinese tour operator?
I think it did. I went to China with a singles group ten years ago. The price for a ten day tour that went to Beijing, Xian, and Shanghai was 1400 USD.This included airfare, nice hotels, ground transportation (a tour bus), breakfast and dinner each day.
The thing was, we were taken to numerous places to buy goods, rugs, jewels, and assorted other crap we didn't want to spend time or money on.
It was virtually a free trip if you didn't buy anything at these shops. Several of the tourists did tho, and they spent big money for some items.
I can't call it a scam, because we never had to pay for stuff we didn't want.
As for these Chinese tours, I'm not sure how they got scammed. I know they were double and triple charged for some stuff (Polo Agogo used to charge them 800 baht to enter and have 1 drink, half of which was returned to the Thai tour operator), but I can't imagine they come here with that much hard currency, so I'm guessing they paid that in the tour price.
It'd be hard to get that kind of money out of all of them once they've come here..Just based on them being tight fisted mainland Chinese.
I think the tour operators in Thailand were Thai, BTW. The money might have been shared with the Chinese originators of course.
Anyway, I'm glad China put a stop to it. I think they should embargo the whole of Thailand for tourism!