South Korean Hotel Cancelled Thai Tourist's Reservation Claiming Thais Are Unreliable
“Thai always no show. You know same as you… Poor people poor life."
By Timothy Tuan — 27 Jun 2019, 03:33 PM
A Thai woman travelling to South Korea with her friends had her reservation cancelled by the hotel a few hours before check-in
The highly rated hotel, Incheon Airport Best Guesthouse had blacklisted the Thai tourist claiming Thais were unreliable, as reported by Coconuts.
According to the female tourist, she had submitted a complaint to Booking.com as that was the only option available.
“The hotel’s in Korea, what can authorities here even do?" she said.
The problem began when the tourist forgot to update her payment information
“I lost my card and got a new one but forgot to update my information. … I got an email from Booking.com telling me to change it within 24 hours,” said the tourist on Twitter.
An hour later, the hotel approached the tourist on Whatsapp asking her to update her information as soon as possible or they would accept another reservation.
She explained to the hotel that according to the email, she had 23 hours left to update her information only to receive a nasty reply from them in return.
According to screenshots of the duo's exchange, the hotel cancelled her reservation on the last day of her trip with her British friends
The message also told the woman that her photo will be sent to "all the guesthouses in Incheon," claiming that she was "Blacklist No.112."
According to Coconuts, the hotel also discriminated the Thais in rugged English during the exchange.
“Thai always no show. You know same as you… Poor people poor life."
The tourist, who declined to give her name for fear of further hostility in the future, took to Twitter to share her experience
This sparked outrage among many Thais, who retweeted and commented on the woman's post while also sharing similar experiences during their travels.
Some of the comments were:
"'Poor people poor life,' that’s so discriminatory. I cannot accept that. That’s dissing an entire culture."
"I've also experienced something similar. At that time, I was checking in at 9pm, the hotel said since there was a big concert and we didn’t call, they didn’t think we’d show. Luckily for us, we had a local friend who argued with them. They told the hotel that they were going to file a police report so they gave us KRW20,000 (about RM72) for our trouble." said another Twitter user.