Beijing Discovery Tours

Just read a couple of articles that confirm what most of us here at Beijing Discovery Tours have already been thinking:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/mcb_china/20080715/wl_mcb_china/foreigntouristsarestayinghome

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/staff/tim_johnson/story/42143.html

We have been fortunate enough to have a few people to have booked tours of Beijing and Great Wall tours with us during the Olympics, so it has not really affected us much, but some of our friendly competitors have admitted that business is not good at all. Here’s hoping that the tourists return to Beijing once the incredibly over-hyped Beijing Summer Olympics 2008 are finally over.

With Olympics fever (and paranoia) in full swing, it has become apparent that many potential visitors to China have been scared away by harsh visa regulations, threats of terrorism and price gouging by hotels and practically everyone else in Beijing. The good news is that it will all soon be over (the Games end with the closing ceremony on August 26), and everyone in Beijing and China will have to face the cold hard reality that despite billions and billions spent to create a gleaming new city, 5 years of hurried planning and fierce construction efforts, and the accompanying displacement of tens of thousands of longtime Beijing residents, the Summer Olympic Games of 2008 last 18 days - a scant 2 1/2 weeks of time for which so much has been spent and lost, and the lives of everyday Beijingers have been irrevocably upended.

Once the inevitable Olympics hangover has set in, Beijing will once again be a fantastic place to visit. October has the best weather in which to take your tour of Beijing - clear blue skies (even without the draconian pollution reduction efforts enforced by the Chinese government), cooler temperatures, and a fantastic pallette of fall colors gracing the numerous sections of the Great Wall of China near Beijing.  Prices for hotel rooms and vehicles for guest transportation should return to reasonable levels, and hopefully they will be hungry for visitors to make up for the lack of guests that did not come during their expected windfall during the Olympics. Beijing Discovery Tours will be here on the ground in Beijing for you to create the perfect Beijing tour or tour of China for your family, group or organization. Take a look at our website at www.BeijingDiscoveryTours.com and let us know at info@beijingdiscoverytours.com how we can help you to create the perfect Beijing tour itinerary at a reasonable price. We can accept payment by credit card through Paypal (you do not have to be a member to use Paypal), wire transfer or most electronic bill payment services offered by U.S. banks. Take advantage of what may be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see Beijing at its sparkling best with Beijing Discovery Tours!

It seems that some in Congress understand that we are losing our rightful place as one of the world’s top tourist destinations: http://www.bizjournals.com/orlando/stories/2008/07/21/story10.html?b=1216612800^1670116

It is good that they realize that there is a problem, but charging current international tourists who have already decided to come to the United States an extra $10 fee to pay for the U.S. to encourage other international tourists to come to America? It seems a bit perverse to tax the people who have already decided to visit the U.S.A. to make up for the poor image that we have created for ourselves around the world. This has the potential to backfire and serve as yet another reminder that the American government sees international tourists as a source of revenue rather than the guests that they are. Guests who are visiting our country should be treated as such, not as potential criminals and a source of income. Just another reason that we are fast becoming the world’s newest evil empire.

One of the reasons that we started Beijing Discovery Tours last year was to take advantage of what we assumed would be a huge boon in tourism to Beijing for the 2008 Summer Olympic Games. The hyperbole surrounding the upcoming event here in Beijing has been constant, ever since it was announced back in 2003 that the Games had been awarded to Beijing. Billions and billions of dollars have been spent upgrading the city’s subway system and infrastructure, not to mention the billions spent on spectacular Olympic venues such as the National Stadium (The Bird’s Nest) and the National Aquatics Center (The Water Cube). Beijing has totally transformed itself over the past 5 years so that people who visited in 2003 and then return this year will likely find themselves disoriented as the city, with few exceptions, has dramatically and irreversibly changed. The sad part of this is that much history has been lost in the race to modernize the city; personally I believe that people will look back with regret upon the rampant destruction of so many of the Beijing hutongs (ancient alleyways) that helped to make Beijing such a unique city. (We still do offer tours of Beijing’s hutongs, there are still some fine examples of these architectural oddities left in the city.) Volumes have been and will be written about the loss of so much of the city’s historic architecture, but that is a subject for another day.

The point of this posting is that I just read an article on TravelDailyNews.com and from other sources about a report from the European Tour Operators Association that states that the Olympic Games actually hurts tourism to the host city. You can read a pdf file of their full report here: http://www.etoa.org/Pdf/ETOA%20Report%20Olympic.pdf and the original article here: http://www.traveldailynews.com/pages/show_page/14268. This study is based on past Olympic cities, but from what we are seeing here in Beijing, the same seems to be holding true for Beijing - the tourists are staying away in droves. Hotel occupancy is nowhere near what was expected, and although every ticket for every event has been sold out, it is possible that many Beijing residents (one has to remember that somewhere around 15 million people live in Beijing) snapped up the tickets hoping to resell them at an enormous profit. (From a personal standpoint, I hope that this is true - maybe I can get some of those basketball tickets that I was wanting at a reasonable price.)

One of the points that the report makes is that regular tourists are “scared away” by the Olympic Games, at least in part due to the increase in hotel prices and prices for other services such as transportation. Beijing’s average hotel rates during the Olympics, at least during the first part of this year, were somewhere around 7 times normal levels. We also have to rely on local drivers who own their own tourism transportation vehicles, and their prices were also much higher than normal for bookings during the Olympic Games. The huge demand for Beijing tours and Beijing hotel rooms has not materialized. It does seem however, that hotel prices have come down as the Olympics are now less than a month away and many hotels have hundreds of rooms still available. I probably shouldn’t write this, but it makes me a little bit happy that people who were planning to gouge visitors to Beijing during the Olympic Games are finding that there are no willing gougees.

I can’t blame people for staying away from Beijing during August, and I find it amazing that Beijing and pretty much all of China has gone overboard in the hype leading up to the Olympic Games. The billions spent, the history lost, the displacement of so many people to build the new venues and infrastructure, was it all worth it for 17 days of Olympic Games that most people in the world really care very little about?

The good news is that it will soon be over, and hopefully Beijing can go back to being the relaxed and laid-back city that it usually is. The best time to come to Beijing should be this September and October, when the weather tends to cool down, the skies clear, and there is some truly beautiful weather to enjoy the truly amazing sights of Beijing. Check out our website at www.BeijingDiscoveryTours.com and email us at info@beijingdiscoverytours.com and we’ll set up a great tour of Beijing for you at a reasonable price.

Security in Beijing all over the city is incredible - police and army everywhere…Beijing has got to be the safest city in the world right now, and it was incredibly safe before! When I came in to the Beijing airport this past Tuesday afternoon, it was obvious that there was security everywhere, but it was non-threatening, as opposed to the atmosphere in most U.S. airports these days. The Western media tends to demonize the Chinese government for everything, sometimes with good reason, but the contrast between the behavior of Chinese airport security and that in the United States is almost unbelievable. We as Americans are brainwashed to believe that we are the freest country in the world, so we are led to believe that everything that our government and police do is in line with keeping our country and our people free, when in fact it is the exact opposite. (That’s right, we are brainwashed too, just as we accuse the Chinese government of doing to its citizens. ) Drive your car without wearing your seatbelt in the U.S.? Illegal, and you can be arrested. Carry an open can of beer down the street? Illegal in most places, and you can easily wind up in jail. I am certainly no apologist for China and there is much that is wrong here, but the United States seems to be headed towards becoming a fascist country while China is rapidly heading in the other direction. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 have sadly become an excuse for the American government and law enforcement to take complete and utter control of every little aspect of our lives. Let’s just hope that we as Americans are smart enough to turn things around before it is too late.

Here’s an even better video of the ridiculous airport beatdown, showing everything that happened…what has happened to the United States of America? Land of the Free? Not so much anymore…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcCmmaCqZhg

As a follow-up to my last post, a couple of days ago on Yahoo I watched this story:

http://cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/up/player/popup/index.php?cl=8772855

It would be funny if it was not perfectly representative of the prevailing attitudes of the TSA and most airport security people in the United States today. This poor woman did nothing wrong (other than to possibly verbally express her objections to what was going on - apparently airport security has never heard of the First Amendment, I believe that one has not been overturned….yet).

In the video, the defense attorney’s arguments in favor of what airport security did are disgusting, she should be ashamed of herself for even attempting to defend what they did - in a court of law that would be her duty as a lawyer, but on television she is only saying what she is saying to get camera time. She is exactly the type of lawyer that gives all lawyers a bad name.

Having just returned from a 3-week vacation back home in Oklahoma, I just read one of the travel newsletters that I subscribe to to try to keep up with what is going on in the industry even though most of it doesn’t apply to Beijing tours and tours of China. One of the articles that I just read, from my daily ASTA (American Society of Travel Agents) newsletter, talked about reasons that the United States is losing out on international tourists (you can read the article here: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/369774_tourism07.html ). First and foremost, and the article mentions this as one of the main reasons that we are losing out on tourism business in the U.S., is the unfriendly and downright rude behavior of our U.S. Customs Agents and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), and I can speak of this through numerous personal experiences with these unfriendly people, who are often the first people that visitors to our great country encounter. Since I don’t have all day to write about my numerous bad experiences with these surly black-uniformed, jack-booted customs agents, I’ll limit this writing to my most recent experience with them in Vancouver, Canada (yes, the American Customs Agents operate in Canada at a “pre-screening” checkpoint, which at the time that I went through was an absolutely un-funny joke, for all people traveling on to the U.S.) Our flight of around 290 people arrived on time from Beijing; then we were herded and separated into passengers staying in Canada or traveling on to the U.S., so there were probably 150 or so of us traveling on to the U.S. We had to go down some stairs into a narrow glass-enclosed hallway to wait our turn to go through U.S. customs, which had so thoughtfully decided to staff this jammed checkpoint with 1 or 2 officers (it varied throughout the time we were there but there were never more than 2 of them.) We never could figure out what the holdup was, but these guys were incredibly slow, taking about an hour and a half to get us all through customs, causing many of us to miss our ongoing flights. Once we were fortunate enough to step up to the non-smiling customs agents after waiting for what seemed like forever, the agent that I dealt with curtly asked how long I had been out of the U.S., then dropped my passport back to me and I had to rush to go claim my bags, which had been sitting beside the baggage carousel for an hour and a half, then hurry to re-check my bags and make my departing flight for Denver, which was leaving in less than 15 minutes. Already harried for having to hurry and disgusted (as was everyone else) at having had to stand in line for so long to get back into my home country (even though I was still in Canada), I was stopped by a cocky little TSA agent who chose me for a random check - which involved not only a 3-minute search with the hand-held metal detector but also a hand pat-down, even though I told him that my flight was leaving in 5 minutes. This TSA guy acted irritated that I even mentioned that I was going to miss my flight and that I pointed out that I had just been thoroughly searched with the hand-held metal detector (he said “that’s right, I was the one the one that told him to do it”) - what was the point of a pat-down by hand? Unless he just enjoys doing that kind of thing…..anyway, I look about as threatening as Mickey Mouse but I was treated like a criminal by an officer of the U.S. government on foreign soil (still in Canada), and I really didn’t appreciate it. Not only did I miss my flight, but my bags didn’t even make it on to Oklahoma City until the next day because of that hour and a half delay caused by the slow/undermanned U.S. Customs checkpoint. Plus it’s always nice to be automatically treated like I am a criminal and tht I have done something wrong when returning to my homeland. This treatment stands in stark contrast to the friendly reception that I usually receive when I return to China, even with the heightened security now at the Beijing airport because of the Olympic Games only being one month away. Kind of makes a person wonder which is the “free” country - Communist China or the United States of America? I am sick and tired of rude treatment by U.S. Customs Agents and TSA “officers”, nearly all of whom seem to get off on a power trip performing their duties rather than trying to keep us safe, which is what their job is all about, not about seeing how many people they can get to jump through their ridiculous hoops. I should not have to feel like a criminal when returning to my homeland, especially when it gets to the point that I get anxious every time I come back home, just because I have to go through this unpleasant experience every time (with rare exceptions, Chicago’s O’Hare seeming to be one of them, at least in my experience.)

Now I know that some people (if anyone ever actually reads this) will say that these people are just doing their jobs and defending our country from terrorists, and that they should be held up as heroes, not villains. Maybe people who have not repeatedly returned from abroad to come back into the U.S. and put up with consistently rude and unwelcoming treatment can say this (and even my own parents say that), but there is a huge difference between protecting us from terrorists and acting like little Nazi dictators throwing around their far too encompassing power and authority. To be fair, I have encountered friendly officers from both U.S. Customs and TSA (I wish that I knew their names so that I could commend them here), but they are very few and far between. I am sick and tired of being treated like a criminal simply because I choose to live my life abroad. I overheard an older American couple while we were standing in the eternal line to pass through customs in Vancouver talking about some British friends of theirs that refused to even travel in transit through the U.S. because of rude treatment and draconian security measures. The article that I linked to above bears this out, and it is destroying what little positive image the U.S. still has left in the world. It is absolutely ridiculous that the “land of the free” bullies those people that are our friends abroad when they come to visit our great country, and something needs to be done about it. There is no reason that these front-line ambassadors for our country can’t at least smile while performing their duties, which are unpleasant enough for people unaccustomed to such treatment when simply visiting another country, and if they can’t do that because they don’t like their jobs or for whatever reason, then they need to find another line of work.

Perhaps this is not an appropriate posting on my business blog but I feel strongly enough about it that I feel more people need to complain and get something done about poor treatment of both U.S. citizens and our foreign friends that come to visit our country. It makes me feel embarrassed that so many people who like the U.S.A. enough to spend hard-earned money to visit but then are subjected to unfriendly border agents, and I feel truly angry that I am forced to feel like a criminal every time that I go home to visit my family. I would encourage anyone else that feels the same way to get the word out in whatever way possible, and maybe eventually someone that has the power to do something will enact some much needed changes to create a more pleasant experience when people enter our country.