Kwan Kin Tours is criticised for not calling families of some of the dead Kwan Kin Tours, whose tour groups have been involved in several serious accidents in recent years, came under heavy fire from victims' relatives yesterday after the latest fatal crash. Lai Tse Shui-ling, mother of Lai Kin-yan, who died in Monday's crash, said she was furious that the travel agency did not call her about the accident. 'I was only notified about the accident by reporters at about 7pm [on Monday] when I was cooking at home,' she said. Yeung Kam-shek also complained that he only learned that his daughter, Yeung Siu-man, was dead when he received a call from a reporter at about 6pm. The two parents then contacted Kwan Kin to find out details about the crash. Meanwhile, an angry caller to Commercial Radio's On a Clear Day phone-in programme claimed she joined a Kwan Kin tour to Shaoxing, Zhejiang, last month on which the bus was overloaded. The woman said she noticed a sign aboard the bus that said it could only carry 20 passengers. 'We had a total of 24 people, including the driver and the tour guide,' she said. 'I told the tour guide that the bus might be overloaded. But he said there was nothing he could do after he called his company [Kwan Kin] in Hong Kong,' she said. She said that if the bus was in an accident, the insurance would probably only have covered 20 of the passengers. Speaking on the same programme, Fong Cheuk-yuen, Kwan Kin's assistant general manager, said he had not received any complaints concerning that incident. However, the caller said she filed a complaint when she returned to Hong Kong, but no one from the travel agency had contacted her. In one of the worst accidents involving Hong Kong tourists, 12 were killed aboard a Kwan Kin tour bus in September 2001. The coach plunged into the Minjiang River near Maowen while en route to the Jiuzhaigou national park in Sichuan province. Only four passengers survived. In May 2000, several tourists were involved in two traffic accidents during a five-day Kwan Kin tour to Guilin. No one was seriously hurt.
