Tourism complaints website

While wandering up the road today I came across two girls standing at the cross walk while a man on a rickshaw trying to get them to take up his services, not forcibly but incredibly annoyingly. They stood at the cross walk while the man yelled from behind us and I cracked a joke to make them feel better.

“Well, now you only have the pickpockets and the girls with the petitions to go through”

To my surprise they answered they had already had to deal with them. If you haven’t run across the girls with the petitions before, they look like people wanting you to sign a petition but they are actually there to get you to stand still so you can be pick pocketed.

Another one is the guys with the cups. They aren’t there to get your money, they are there to find out how much you have and where it is. Somebody else can do the pick pocketing and if it ever looks like you are going to win, one of their friends will pick the winning cup instead.

There is the jogger that runs into you and while he is apologising his friends steals a bag and then there are the flat out muggers which are thankfully fairly rare.

And that is just in France. There are a lot more ways that I don’t know about and hopefully won’t find out about in the wrong way but it isn’t great of you are a tourist. There are certainly a lot more ways in other countries.

This is of course, probably the least likely complaint a tourist would be making. I hope so anyway. There are bed bugs, bad meals, misleading prices, etc….

Wouldn’t it be great to have all these things in a place where people could see them. Wouldn’t it be great to know that before you come to Paris the girls with the petitions are trying to scam you. Or in New Zealand that you have to be careful of your luggage, or your car, especially in the north.

I think a tourism complaints website would be a great idea, match it up to a map and we could all see what goes on in the world. To stop submissions scamming you would have to post a photo of yourself at a famous landmark or something. I could actually be quite fun. Not just how I went on holiday, but how they tried to overcharge and rob me as well.