Our Tours Have No Shopping Stops
Our tours have no shopping stops so that you can make the best use of your time. During the tour we may patronize restaurants, museums and theatres where a souvenir store is attached. You may want to ignore the merchandise as prices at these places tend to be inflated. Extra caution is advised when you see anything labelled as antique. Don’t buy expensive jade, tea, furniture, carpet or artwork unless you are completely sure of your expertise. China’s freshwater pearls dominate entry level market around the world, but it’s never a great idea to go to China for Tahiti pearls.
Why Tour Companies Love Shopping Stops
Having shopping stops embedded into tour programs is one way for tour companies to make money. This is a common practice among tour companies because it is very profitable for them. In fact, some tour companies exist primarily to deceive – luring gullible consumers in with a price too good to be true only to march them incessantly through such hideous traps; in such cases, even if you buy nothing, the tour company still gets to collect a fee from the shop for taking you there and making you stay in the shop for 2 hours or longer.
Some China tour operators offering seemingly dirt-cheap tours say their tours are subsidized by the Chinese government and therefore they are obligated to take the tourists to the government-owned stores. This is a fraudulent claim, a cynical scheme to exploit the ignorance and credulity of consumers who can’t live without bargains. Anyone in their right mind should wonder why the Chinese government is interested in subsidizing trips of foreign tourists when the country already holds the highest foreign exchange reserve in the world! It’s just ludicrous to even consider that the Chinese government would have time to fleece tourists when it is so busy overseeing the world’s second largest and an ever expanding economy.
China Tours Subsidized by Chinese Government Don’t Exist
You may have read somewhere that all China tour companies include shopping stops in their tours because the operators don’t have a choice. Such misinformation is understandable if it comes from a credulous tourist. When this nonsense comes direct from a tour company, you know you are dealing with a dishonest business.
Expensive tours do not necessarily guarantee that you will not be marched through tourist shops while the cheap ones, regardless of the operators’ claims and promises, will certainly include repeated shopping stops, often in addition to a long list of optional programs offered at hugely inflated prices. They let the guides and drivers parade the groups through tourist stores so that they don’t have to pay the guides and drivers. It is not uncommon for cheap China tour operators to sell their groups to guides and drivers. Guess what happens afterwards? Before the COVID-19 pandemic, this scheme was used by many tour operators peddling cheap China tours. These companies all went out of business during the pandemic, but some of those “entrepreneurs” who made lots of money through cheating most likely will come back when the time is right.
Consumers going on dirt-cheap China tours should brace themselves for lots of time wasted at tourist stores, lousy food, cheap hotels located far from city centre, and ignorant guides more interested in getting a good return on their investment than on anything else.
To sum up, China tours subsidized by Chinese government simply don’t exist and now you know why.