The description of the room was completely different from the room, extremely hot and humid even by Thailand standards, the windows wouldn't lock and could be opened from the balcony (accessible from other rooms), and the room just had bedding: no wardrobe, no drawers, no hangers, nothing (the pictures showed rooms with some basic amenities). On top it wasn't cheap either.
When we raised the concerns, the manager was both extremely drunk and non cooperative, which awarded shitty reviews. We didn't even spend there the night and took the last minute cancellation fee as a loss. They replied with made up stuff about us being violent and threatening.
Despite that, the place had (and still has) raging reviews from bogans, as it has a bar with plenty of beer variety on the ground floor running basically 24/7.
I also met some really nice people in Thailand, but I do feel it has been a bit ruined by the wrong kind of tourism.
One reason Thailand is safer than most "third world" countries is that tourism is taken very seriously by the government. Most notably, they have a "tourist police" that can be called if you run into trouble.
Also note that most "scams" are just overpricing. Sure, it sucks paying 5 times the local price, but when it is 10 times more expensive in your home country, it is not really a big deal.
One year later still feeling sad for not able to protect us from it. Have become extremely suspicious of helpful people/sellers. Had issues with buying stuff since the trip. Not the price/money that is/has been the issue. I wished I never visited Bangkok.
Similar as this one, but for suits instead. (Did not plan to buy it, in fact earlier that day I wonder why/laugh at people that did it, just a few hours later I was one of them. Now I understand them an why it works and will continue to work for 20 more years) https://www.lonelyplanet.com/thorntree/forums/asia-thailand/...
TLDR; Thailand suppose to be me an my partners dream trip. Was our worst trip, lead to us splitting up and started to have trust issue. Feeling depressed about it, still sad about it one year later.
My reason for going to Thailand was that I had an internship in Australia (I'm from the Netherlands) and I was going to change planes there anyway, so I figured I might as well spend a month in the area. While I didn't like the cities, there were many other nice and beautiful places.
People have different levels of risk tolerance and different interests. I have traveled in a number of poor or somewhat conflicted countries and while it's definitely not always enjoyable, I don't think everything in life is about enjoyment and they were really valuable experiences that shaped my view on the world in other ways. (Not to sound like a disaster tourist - in all cases I was either passing through or working in the area, it's not like I went to watch poverty or conflict.)
It pays to know what you want, to have a permanent bitch-face and a habit of saying no to everything else.
You will know what to avoid and what to expect
Tuk tuks are always bad deal/tourist attraction, make sure Taxis use meter, don't take any of their suggestions (girls, jewelery, etc) or accept detours
To be safe, use Grab application, - no wasting time trying to speak to the driver asking where you want to go, - no tips (from rounding up the payment), - no taking you places you don't want to go.
Yes, even if you're right, you shouldn't write a bad review because the justice system is corrupt.
The article is mixing issues unrelated to the case here
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/nov/23/briton-thail...
And no, that is clearly not what they’re trying to communicate (although the actual goal remains unclear). If the premise was “don’t write a review, they’re corrupt and will spuriously jail you”, then they wouldn’t offer the hotel chain the benefit of the doubt.
I have no great interest in going (I live in Taiwan and the average review I hear for a family vacation isn’t very flattering) but if I were I would be really careful. Most people woefully lack an underground/crime IQ and don’t know how to act in certain situations, often refuse to listen to reason.
I used to work as a bouncer for years after I got sick of corporate work and every once in a while some jackass or Karen would work up the nerve to get weird with the HA guys wearing their vests or getting snarky about calling cops on local dealers who are actually not working per se but trying to unwind with a drink. Honestly, some people get it in their head that they are untouchable because they are “good people” and the cops will protect them. Most people aren’t stupid like this so going on vacation to Thailand has a 99.99% likelihood of being ok.
Like think of someone who is warned about being careful in Mexico and then they petulantly do exactly the opposite. I’m sure Thailand attracts tons of idiots.
You don’t need to be an idiot for you trip to go bad. I used a local transportation. When getting off a Chinese tourist had lost is wallet in it. A local just took it for himself while the tourist was still in sight. The scene went too fast for me to do anything but I felt bad for the guy who will likely get charged on credit card, lost all his cash and probably ID too.
It sucks that it happens but if you take proper precaution it shouldn't ruin the vacation besides a slight annoyance...
It's also bad luck, as a counterpoint, I forgot my bag with my computer at a restaurant in Bangkok, I noticed 30 minutes later, came back and the restaurant staff had kept it for me.
Then again, I typically describe any place with more than a few dozen people as overly crowded for the purposes of vacationing, so maybe I’m not the right person to ask.
Just to name a couple things I find interesting there; your interests presumably differ.
I've read a few of articles on this case now, and none of them really seem to grasp how this law work. They say he lives in Thailand though, so he really should know better. It's up there with "never say bad things about the king" in regards to things every expat living in Thailand should know.
That's common in many countries. "It's true" is only a valid defense if you're accusing someone of a crime.
This is a good article on the history of the issue: https://mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/941/criminal-libel
Edit: added the [].
In the US, the burden of proof is on the person suing for libel; they have to prove that what was said is false.
So in the UK, yes truth is a defense... but you can still be telling the truth and unable to prove it, which makes it not much help.
There are two clearly distinct legal traditions: the common law in the anglo countries and civil law in the rest. Also USA and UK seem to have very different and each of them unique treatment in this matter.
So it's not a question of first world countries vs the rest. It's more of a USA vs UK vs the rest of democratic countries, not sure where other Commonwealth countries fall.
Edit: I feel I wasn't clear. Civil law countries mostly adhere to ancient legal doctrine, some coming from Roman Empire, some from middle ages tradition, some from Bonaparte, some from German theoreticians. This corpus is pretty consistent, grown through statutes, while common law tend to develop idiosyncratic variants following practice in every country.
On the matter of defamation the US is quite different from everywhere else though, because of the 1st amendment, and the 'actual malice' standards applied to 'public figures' in defamation cases. The confounding factors in the EU are the privacy clauses in the European Convention on Human Rights, so you see cases that would be related to defamation elsewhere being litigated on privacy in the EU.
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In the US, the publication of private matters is a separate tort, invasion of privacy. For IOP, truth is not a defense.
Or another way of looking at it: libel is a narrower tort in the US than it is in the rest of the world.
Some European countries do have quite strict privacy laws, so a newspaper which obtained the material in a questionable way might have to be cautious (see the News International hacking scandal, for instance).
What case was this? Are you sure you're not talking about the Max Mosley (the former racing driver/FIA boss) case against News Group? Because that was a breach of privacy case, not a defamation one.
It was a huge deal for a few weeks, and then it disappeared. I only remember it because my Torts professor brought it up in class during the defamation lecture as an example of the differences between US and UK defamation law.
Also, what does the cold war alignment have to do with this?
However, the meanings of these have changed from political designations to economic designationms.
Economically, american citizens have much lower access to basic social services and we let people die on the street with vacant housing in the neighborhood. Does that make us second world or third world?
At least local journalists are waking up to how bad it is with the wealthy suddenly throwing their weight around and taking every paper in the nation to court over a few words.
A terrible import from the UK. Despite all the nastiness and bad words, protected free speech is what the US really did get right.
All laws can be used in a multitude of unintended ways, something lawmakers never really consider.
Suppose you know a person who committed a crime and be punished years ago and there is no immediate threat of doing it again, revealing that fact is a defamation, unless a person is a public figure like the politician and revealing the fact is important for public welfare.
Many US jurisdictions have both, and Constitutionally-allowable criminal defamation had almost identical conditions to Constitutionally-allowable civil defamation.
> The thing that makes it really bad though, is that truth is not always a defence for criminal defamation offences. The law is something to the effect of "disclosing private matters can be defamation even if it's true"
Truth isn’t a defense to (civil or criminal) invasion of privacy or public disclosure of private fact claims in the US, either. They are distinct from defamation, rather than the part of the same offense, but aside from that...
That is, unless this case got special treatment due to the alleged corruption of Thai justice system.
I for one have nothing bad to say about the Thai mafia.
People need free discussion, ESPECIALLY during this scamdemic where everyone is seriously on edge.
Edit: If people get banned they just open up a new account. I've lost track how many accounts I've gone thru over the years. Yes, many were banned for unknown/irrational reasons, but the point is people just open a new account and done.
If that's true, it's because this community hasn't yet gone too far down the path to brain death followed by heat death, which has traditionally been the fate of internet communities. The HN guidelines are a way of attempting to stave off that fate: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....
Swipes like "What are you talking about", "Wrong", "You’re inventing things and twisting reality", "The ridiculous part is your comment", "Are you for real", "What are you talking about", "Your statement has no connection to reality", "You apparently have not read enough" (all of which unnameduser1 managed to post in just this thread!) are obviously against the HN guidelines, which ask people to be kind, not to call names, and so on: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
It's our experience that when internet commenters come with sharp elbows in this way, it has negative effects on community. Perhaps you feel that these things are no big deal—certainly judgments can differ. But usually people who think 'no big deal' are deriving their standards from what works well in smaller, more cohesive communities. My favorite example of that is rugby players who beat the crap out of each other and then go out drinking together afterwards. Other examples might be an academic colloquium where the participants go hard after each other's ideas, or literary circles where people trade barbed witticisms. Or simply just regular watercooler conversation or talking smack with friends.
All of those environments are richer and able to sustain a much wider range than we can here. It may not feel like it, but HN is a broadcasting channels to millions of people. Broadcasting channels can't function the way that closed, intimate environments can—they are much too incohesive. People are far quicker to hear things that haven't actually been said (or meant), have extreme reactions, respond in kind or worse, and we end up with a Tacoma Narrows Bridge effect.
So yeah, we have to operate with safety factors that to some extent make discussion more bland (a downside) but have the effect of preserving the community for relatively high-signal communication, as opposed to shallow hostility, which eventually leads to screaming matches and then, as I said, heat death. Moderating HN as if it didn't need those safety factors would in my opinion be a big mistake.
If that seems wrong to you, it's probably because you're assuming a degree of stability that doesn't exist here. This is an easy assumption to make, because if X doesn't seem so bad, it's natural to think "what's wrong with X" and feel like the moderators are "heavy ham fisted" for scolding X. The problem is that X is not an end state in the state machine.
If it were merely a few sharp elbows, maybe that wouldn't be a big deal—but large internet forums are not stable this way. You can't stop at sharp elbows, because when people feel affronted, they escalate. Sharp elbows lead to nose punches, then brawls, and so on. If we start to go down that road, the most desirable and intelligent users will simply stop coming, leading to a higher concentration of low-signal/high-noise behavior, which will accelerate the feedback loop, and before long there will be no one left who feels that "people here are intelligent adults".
If anyone wants more explanation, here are some past ones:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24548414
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21633967
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15378909
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9378899
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7906377
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7742471
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
I had a good time there, but I remember my expectations were low. But news like this make me cross that country from the map of future traveling.
I remember feeling when at entrance in Singapore I got stamp on passport with small print warning that "drug usage is punishable by death" regardless of not using drugs, I could not help myself of overthinking "what if someone puts a small bag in my luggage" or what if I my sleeve brushed somewhere where someone was sniffing coke...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninoy_Aquino_International_Air...
As for Thailand and other Asian countries, what you must understand about Asian culture in general as a westerner is the tremendous weight of saving face there. Something that you might think of as relatively innocuous and the cost of doing business, like raising your voice, a bad hotel review, or a negative restaurant write-up (after all, nobody anywhere gets 100% five star reviews) is something that creates dishonor and triggers immediate defense mechanisms that escalate according to the severity of how much face has been lost. Embarrassing Asians in public can cause them to feel that they are losing social standing, reputation, influence, dignity, and honour, and you should consider whether it's worth the hassle over something trivial to put them on the defensive.
I got searched by airport security. They found the medication. They asked me what it was. I told them. And then this guy says "Okay good, I will have some after my shift". He then opens the bottle takes 2 pills out and puts them in his pocket and hands it back to me.
Moral of the story: in the Philippines, act like a boss, get treated like a boss. It's a delicate balance, but you're more likely to succeed if you're polite rather than arrogant. Rules are not hard like they are in the west, they can be bent if not broken.
Maybe that you should wait until you're safely home before you write your negative review. Well, it's not what he says, but it's probably the best advice in these cases.
Yes, the punishment is excessive but not sure how the guest is “right”.
Your comment is cherry picking the later section while ignoring the beginning, it seems.
> According to media reports the whole drama initially started as the guest brought outside alcohol into the hotels dining outlets which wasn’t permitted. It then resulted in a verbal row between the management and this particular individual who then posted bad reviews across several review boards.
>Your comment is cherry picking the later section while ignoring the beginning, it seems.
I didn't claim that the guest was right. In my original comment, the only mention of "right" was in a hypothetical.
The article says the hotel wanted a fee for bringing in alcohol. Where are you getting that not paying a fee to bring alcohol to a hotel and lying about it would be a serious crime in thailand?
This is all pretty dark though and violates my own personal values. Not sure why there are so many in the comments here defending this hotel.
>Originally from Germany, Sebastian studied Business Management and worked in related positions for various companies including Lufthansa and the Thomas Cook Group before obtaining his BA and Masters Degree in Vancouver, Canada.
So if it's a corporation or a person, Powell is probably going to side with the corporation. Business school is like some kind of weird anti-customer, anti-worker brainwashing program. I've read the books they teach in project management and business courses. It was like an instruction manual for being a house slave.
>While this reaction by the hotel does sound excessive I’d give them the benefit of the doubt that this guest behaved like a total idiot while at the property and then turned around with very unflattering descriptions and manufactured truths aka lies about this resort. He then refused to discuss the matter with the hotel and instead of stopping even accelerated his online badmouthing on channels other than TripAdvisor after the first bad review was “managed” away (deleted).
>These little islands in Thailand are well known to be essentially run by the local mafia and a lot of people have met their fate at these islands after run in with the locals. In 2014 a British couple was killed on Koh Tao and the crime was later pinned on some illiterate Burmese migrant workers. The two Burmese were initially sentenced to death and just received a Royal pardon, reducing the sentence to life imprisonment.
>I’m just noting this in the context of the situation at hand to show that one should consider his behavior and own security while on these islands.
He's giving the hotel the benefit of the doubt that it's the guest's fault, but also brings up that the islands are run by the mafia and has a corrupt justice system. What's he trying to say? That even if you're right, you shouldn't write a bad review because the justice system is corrupt and you're going to end up in jail anyways?