Unscrupulous tour operators may have broken laws, used improper documents and even impersonated legitimate companies to rake in cash from the boom in tourism from the mainland, players in the sector said on Friday morning.
The comments were made in reaction to Tuesday’s incident in which a group of mainland tourists chose to sleep on a tour coach, after tour company 3A Holidays failed to secure proper accommodation for them. Other groups have faced similar glitches.
On Friday morning, the proprietor of 3A Holidays, Wong Wing-kin, told police he suspected phoney tour leaders had pretended to be from his agency and falsely led some of the recent tours that have generated complaints.
Wong admitted that three of the bungled tours - two that returned to Shenzhen for lack of hotel rooms and one that slept on the coach on Tuesday night - were the responsibility of his agency, but other recent mismanaged tours had nothing to do with 3A Holidays.
In one of those tours, tourists had to sleep on a cruise ship for lack of the hotel rooms they were expecting.
Meanwhile, the Travel Industry Council has asked 3A Holidays to give an account of the incident at the TIC office on Friday afternoon, council executive director Joseph Tung Yao-chung said on Friday morning.
That is sooner than required under the watchdog’s rules, which allow tour companies seven days report on an incident like Tuesday’s botched hotel arrangements.