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It's time more nations copied China's tourist blacklist for bad behaviour

Chinese travellers may have hit the headlines for the wrong reasons lately, but holidaymakers from other nations are just as crass and loutish - so why don't those countries start banning them from going abroad, asks Stuart Heaver

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A Chinese tourist strikes a similar pose to statues as they visit the Grand Palace in Bangkok. Public outrage forced the Thai government to issue thousands of Chinese-language etiquette manuals last year in an effort to ensure sightseers behave themselves. Photo: Reuters

Published: 10:30pm, 2 Jan 2016Updated: 1:19pm, 20 Oct 2016

Five more individuals have been added to the Chinese government's so-called tourist blacklist, started last year, after two Chinese travellers earned special recognition for throwing hot water over a flight attendant during a Bangkok-to-Nanjing flight.

British tourists are led before a public prosecutor in Crete after being arrested for offending public decency by dressing up in little black dresses, supposedly as a take-off of Greek nuns (whose habits are actually considerably longer). Photo: EPA

The list isn't a bad idea but it perpetuates the myth that crass, rude and ignorant tourists are entirely a Chinese problem. As an extensive traveller in the region, I am convinced badly behaved tourists are a multinational issue.

SEE ALSO Travel taboos: how not to be an obnoxious tourist - wherever you're from

A friend who runs a scuba-diving school in Thailand admits his company had to enforce a secret ban on Russian tourists after several considered two bottles of vodka the bare minimum refreshment before their morning dive. I have observed German tourists at beach resorts who wade into the surf to urinate without even troubling to swim around a bit to disguise the fact, like the rest of us do. The binge drinking, vomiting and football chanting of young British tourists is legendary, while some French and Italian travellers think it is perfectly appropriate to go shopping in Muslim communities stark naked except for a bootlace loosely fashioned into swimwear.

Two women talk to a man on a public beach in Dubai, where there have been crackdowns on topless sunbathing, nudity and any other forms of indecent behaviour on beaches. Photo: AP

Judging by media reports, crass tourist behaviour increasingly has an alcohol-fuelled dimension. In 2012, two Welsh tourists and an Australian broke into Australia's Queensland Sea World, swam with the dolphins, emptied a fire extinguisher in the shark tank and kidnapped a penguin named Dirk. Last year, an inebriated Australian tourist hijacked a local minibus and drove it to The Peak. It was a tasteless quartet of one Brit, one Dutchman and two Canadians who were arrested in Malaysia for posing naked on the summit of Mount Kinabalu. If the religious authorities are to be believed, they caused a huge earthquake.

It's time the blacklist policy was adopted by more nations because, when it comes to loutish and embarrassing behaviour by tourists, there is no such thing as a Chinese monopoly.