Ordinary Gweilo

Simon has noticed a story in The Standard about another clever scheme to fleece tourists.  Apparently some enterprising businessmen have set up a mall in lovely downtown Kowloon Bay specifically for mainland tourists, and called it the “Hong Kong Tourist (Duty Free) Shopping Mall”.  Nothing is left to chance, and mainland tourists are brought to this mall by their kindly travel agents to do their shopping.  So convenient, lah.

Remarkably, it appears that prices are somewhat higher than in shops that the rest of us frequent, and, of course, there’s those weasel words “duty free”.  There is no sales tax in Hong Kong (though the government has plans to introduce one at some unspecified point in the future).  Visitors may not realize that, and in many countries around the world avoiding paying sales tax or VAT is an attractive prospect.   

A few years back the same thing was done to Japanese tourists, but rather more elegantly.  Visitors were taken to one of the DFS outlets, usually on their way to the airport, I believe, and given half an hour to buy presents for their friends and relatives back home.  Poor old DFS (I think it’s meant to stand for "Duty Free Stores") has rather fallen on hard times, what with the dramatic drop in visitors from Japan and the general downturn in the retail sector, but I think they’re still hanging on in there.

The other part of the trick was to charge Japanese tourist more than everyone else for their hotel rooms.  For reasons which I don’t fully understand, hotels here seem to offer their best rates to travel agents, who then sell the rooms to the general public (after adding their mark-up).  The travel agents each seem to specialise in particular nationalities, thus making it very simple to charge different prices in different markets.  The SCMP used to periodically take an interest in this strange business, but of course it isn’t illegal and if challenged the hotels will say that there was no rule that Japanese tourists had to buy their rooms from a Japanese travel agent.

These days we don’t get so many visitors from Japan.  One reason is that ten years or so ago the Hong Kong Tourist Board played up the Japanese concerns about the handover, and did their best to persuade them to come here before it became part of Communist China.  The first part of the plan was very successful, but it made the drop in visitor numbers after the handover even more dramatic.  Somehow Hong Kong seems to have dropped off the map as far as the Japanese are concerned. 

These days Hong Kong is heavily reliant on visitors from the mainland.  They come here and buy expensive brand-name goods, whilst at the same time Hong Kong people are flooding into Shenzen to buy cheap fakes.  Each to his own.