Your Holiday Dollars

Your holiday dollars equate to the second or third largest industry for most SE Asian countries and how you spend them can help put right the damage, including human rights abuse, caused by corrupt governments / authorities in those countries, and the foreign policies of western governments, such as the USA, Britain and Australia (see Travel Ethos page). While your own country’s major shareholders rape and pillage the developing world in league with the corrupt, you can put right some or even all of the harm they do by spending your holiday dollars selectively.

Most of the corrupt wealthy families of SE Asia make money from “bribes” / “bungs” and from investing in other profitable industries; that’s right, including tourism. By refusing to stay at hotels owned in part or in full by the bad or notorious, you will absolutely support the good and encourage change. For example, many if not most of the hotels in Nusa Dua Bali are owned in part or in full, directly or indirectly through anonymous management companies in Jakarta, by members of the Suharto family. President Suharto is claimed by most human rights groups to be guilty of everything from mass murder (as many as 200,000 Balinese were murdered by the Suharto state in 1966/67 alone) to wholesale corruption; these reports are easy to believe when you realize the Indonesian President’s salary is so low yet the Suharto’s are now so outlandishly wealthy. Many say the Suharto's stole the land in Nusa Dua and the evidence points to their hotels entering into exclusive supply agreements (food, drinks, etc.) with “selected” suppliers, so the Balinese do not even get anything from that. Even when a western hotel group puts their name on one of these hotels it tends only to be a partnership or management deal with the real owners. Read our Worthwhile Links page for links to sites that name and shame the Suharto family owned hotels.

It is not just the Suharto’s and focusing too much on them de facto pardons the other wealthy, powerful families of not just Indonesia but Thailand too. It is hard to imagine any large hotel that is outside that often less than savory business circle and perhaps it is in some ways wrong to avoid certain hotels just based upon ownership. However, be careful, many of these hotels of questionable owner pedigree also often play a very nasty marketing game by featuring some feigned or insignificant charitable cause on their web sites and marketing material. At the end of the day though it is almost guaranteed that if a hotel treats its staff well, it will also show equal respect for the community and culture around it. We therefore suggest you go to our “Travel Fraud” page to read about service charge fraud by hotels. If you find a hotel that does not cheat its staff on service charges, it is almost certain you will have found an ethical and responsible hotel in all other respects as well.

Booking with and through totally ethical companies not just means you are spending your valuable holiday dollars with the good guys and encouraging a better business culture in plus offsetting your own national corporations’ damage to these countries, but you are also sure to get better quality, better value and more authenticity as well. Hotels and agents that cheat staff basically are certain to cheat anyone and everyone, including you the guest.

By showing you have Travel Ethos you should not just have a better holiday, you almost certainly will automatically adopt an attitude which will make you and the people you meet of the country you are travelling to happier and better off too. By taking care how you spend your money, or rather who you spend it with will almost certainly make you more aware and experience more of the country you visit. This in turn should help reverse the negative sentiments many in the 3rd world quite rightly feel towards westerners because of how foreign governments behave in league with the corrupt in their own country. Unfortunately those compounding negative feelings increasingly give way to acts of violence against westerners themselves. Osama bin Laden said that the USA was a victim of its own foreign policy, but he was wrong; US citizens are a victim of US political and corporate foreign policy, and it is not just the USA. By spending your dollars wisely and with it becoming more in tune and sharing with the local population and their culture, you almost certainly will offset the problems our own leaders are creating for us but seldom for themselves.

Thank you