Standing Up for Justice

When backpacking, I have a certain knack for finding good cheap hotel rooms. This usually includes walking out of the train/bus station where a few dozens hotel touts bombard you with pictures and prices, carrying a Rough Guide travel guide in hand for map referencing, and insisting that you have a reservation while actually listening for which hotel is offering the best prices. Then, as soon as the touts have subsided, you either follow advice from former travellers and ignore all of the touts, or you actually take their suggestions but ditch them before arriving at the hotel to avoid commission fees and to bargain down the price even farther. 99% of the time, this works wonderfully.

However, when discovering that the train my mother and I were taking to Guilin, China wouldn't arrive until one thirty a.m., I decided that for her comfort and my peace of mind that we might should actually book ahead (something I haven't done in all of my four months of travelling.) I thought that it would be easy, right? I went to a travel agent. We argued about the price. He finally agreed to mine (250 kuai - 30 bucks). He booked the hotel. I paid him. He gave me a receipt with the price, the hotel's name, and their phone number. Very straightforward.

Yes, very straightforward until we got to Guilin. After being promptly picked up by a travel agent in his van we were taken to our hotel. It wasn't in a great place, it wasn't the most attractive, and it wasn't the name of the hotel that was given to us, but we were tired and didn't really mind. Well, I didn't mind until our agent casually mentioned as were were bringing in our bags that we would need to pay him an extra 100 kuai. Why? His reason: because we are foreigners and the hotel we had been promised wasn't available for us. The real reason: because the travel agent knew that at two a.m. we would have no choice but to pay the extra money and that they could pull this stunt and make a bigger profit. He's obviously never met a backpacker named Carmen Wolfe.

Naturally, I refused to pay the extra money. I had a receipt with the agreed price and I wasn't budging an inch over it. Yes, 100 kuai is only about 12 dollars, but it's not the money...it's the principle.

In China, any disagreements must be resolved through yelling, in Chinese, until you get what you want. So, this is what I did. My poor mom was a trooper sat in the lobby of the hotel at two a.m. while I fought for justice. I called our former travel agent and yelled, while I yelled at the new agent, while I yelled at the hotel staff, and while the travel agents proceeded to yell at each other. After almost an hour of yelling, nothing was being resolved. I wasn't letting go of my red stamped binding contract receipt and finally declared that we would sleep in our agent's van to preclude him from going home if he didn't find us a hotel, right then, for the agreed price. Seeing that he wasn't going to sleep at all that night unless he fixed this problem, our agent was suddenly able to think of a perfect place, and by 3:30 am we were resting soundly in our 250 kuai room.

Is it worth it to argue for over an hour at two in the morning over twelve bucks? To most people, no. But to me, I do things like this for the next traveller who comes along after me - I assure that they won't try pulling that stunt on a foreigner for a while. I'm just taking it one small victory for justice a time.