Excerpts from the weekly Outlook (July 28, 2008): Seven Deadly Habits of Indian tourists abroad.
1. Loading up on food from free breakfast buffets at hotels, often enough to last them through the day. 2. Shoplifting; bargaining incessantly in places with fixed prices. 3. Getting drunk on the plane. 4. Treating guides, hotel staff like personal servants; refusing to tip them. 5. Ogling and hitting on foreign women, even when accompanied by their wives. 6. Demanding Indian food in restaurants in Paris and Zurich. 7. Jumping queues; late for everything - and then throwing tantrums when they miss and event. "It began in the plane," says the weary young man who works for one of India's top travel companies. "They started changing seats haphazardly, ordering as many little packets of complimentary peanuts as they could lay their hands on, and getting drunk on all those little bottles of booze. When we landed in Bangkok, they behaved as if this was a nation of prostitutes, even hitting on the women behind the immigration counter. The men travelling with their wives were no better than the rest - a 50 plus man from Jaipur went crazy shooting pictures of women in traditional off-the-shoulder tops, often trying to hug them while his wife looked on meekly." The authorised version of Indian outbound travel is a rah rah story bristling with impressive figures. 8 million exhuberant Indians hitting foreign shores every year, their hard earned "brown" dollars and pounds eagerly scooped up by the international retail and tourist trade. 8 million set to double to 16 million in 2011, says Euromonitor International, and likely to soar to 50 million by 2020, according to the World Tourism Organisation. An economic downtuen may take the sheen of some of those figures, but in the long term we are told, the "India outbound story" can only be an upbeat one, as a rising growing middle class flies out to meet the world. Roland Toronto. On Sun, Oct 5, 2008 at 6:55 AM, Gabriel de Figueiredo <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I was travelling Singapore-Mumbai on SIA, and we were about to land. The > usual announcement re laptops / electronic equipment to be switched off. A > bloke of Indian origin, kept on using his laptop. Air-hostess was ignored. > Then comes the purser, who proceeded to tell the guy off in such a manner > that he literally squirmed in his seat. I could hear threats of arrest etc. > Only then was the laptop turned off.
