Addressing the rip-off merchants

      Foreign visitors to Vietnam soon tire of paying over the mark-up for everything, be it a bunch of bananas or a motorbike ride.
As any visitor to Vietnam soon discovers, there is currently a two-tier pricing system differentiated for foreigners and locals which resides inside the minds of many Vietnamese vendors.
Of course, this two-tier system, or some would call “foreigner inflation,” is something that every foreigner deals with on a daily basis.
The xe om (motorbike taxi) is rarely what a local would pay for travelling the same distance.
Going to Ben Thanh Market in downtown Ho Chi Minh City, most foreigners are aware that unless they speak some Vietnamese, they can expect to pay double or triple the price for items.
It is an unfortunate admission that one of the primary reasons for my Vietnamese language studies was to stop being ripped off.
ADVICE TO AVOID BEING RIPPED OFF
■ Always make sure you take a metered taxi
■ Buy fruit and vegetables in supermarkets which have clear pricing or from vendors with written prices per kilogram
■ Agree on a price with the xe om or cyclo driver before getting in the vehicle
■ Ask at your hotel about the cost of goods prior to purchasing them
Now when I head to the market, I can ask why the lady before me paid “x” for her oranges, when I’m being asked to pay twice as much.
There is a broader point to be made here.
Upon arriving at the airport, one does battle with taxi drivers who try to promote a trip downtown – for example US$10 to Dong Khoi Street – preying on the naivety of newcomers who do not know that the metered price would be no more than VND80,000 ($5).
One subsequently barters time again for a fair price in the markets, with cyclo and xe om drivers on the streets, and in restaurants whose menus conveniently lack numerical details.
Over the course of a two-week vacation, the cost of all these extras soon adds up to a tainted holiday.
Vietnamese vendors often seem unbothered about whether they actually make a sale.
In fact, infuriatingly, it seems they would rather forgo a sale than drop their inflated price by even a few thousand dong.
The wider impact of such negative experiences, accruing cumulatively as one travels the length of Vietnam from north to south, will one day be visible in tourist figures.
Return tourists are one reason why Thailand generates such high numbers of international visitors – roughly 14 million in 2007, of which 60 percent consists of repeat tourists.
While tourist numbers are still rising in Vietnam, some 4.1 million last year, how many of those are coming back because they enjoyed the Vietnamese experience? Backpackers’ chagrin
I went down to the backpacker area in District 1 to find out what folks had experienced in this regard.
Tony Longtemps, a young Canadian on a trip traversing Southeast Asia, says the difference between neighboring countries is palpable: “In Laos, Thailand and Cambodia, locals were generally just happy to make a sale.
If I didn’t like the price they gave me, more often than not, they’d accept the one I offered. It doesn’t work that way here.”
His female traveling companion, Celeste Fondleberry, hails from the European backwater of Luxembourg.
She agreed with Longtemps, adding: “Everyone expects a little bit of price-hiking, that’s par for the course for travelers. But when you find out by how much they mark thing up, well, it feels like daylight robbery!”
When asked whether such negative experiences would influence their decision to return to Vietnam, they both said undoubtedly it would.
One can hardly make too broad a conclusion based on a spot survey in Pham Ngu Lao, but I have had four years of personal experience of being ripped off and I hear similar tales shared by fellow expats.
The fact is that rip-off merchants wear one down.
The hope remains that Vietnamese vendors will change their outlook to entice return customers, rather than simply focusing on short-term gains.