We found a bad experience from a group of people staying in the Sea Sun Sand Resort Phuket in Thailand. It is not very unusual that this kind of people happen. The hotel management if they are Thai always stands on the staff side, even if their wrong, they do not know the words “the customer is always right”. I have the same problem with other hotels in Thailand and but they never reported to the media and most of the time a report is never mad at the police station.
The story goes like this
Between Matthew Abeyta, Ken Austin , Mark Richard Budden, Effie Chen, Maxwell Chow, Steve Finch, Holger Graf, George P. Hansen, Nick Himsworth, Robert Kelly, Steve Leavenworth, Joy Li, Tony Luce, Steve Milgrim, Ray Moroney, Nicholas Raistrick, You, Anja Batista Sonksen, Wenli Wang, Jason Womack and Hartmut Kraft
Having stayed at the hotel for a couple of days, we build up a level of trust and decided that the room safe with combination code would be a safer option than having to carry passports and cash to the beach day in day out.. this was a big mistake..
Each day I would check to see how much money I had left to spend before the holiday came to an end. A few days before departure I confirmed that I still had around $1000USD in funds available. I then locked the safe and as I had previously done in the past few days, left my room key with reception.
After dinner and drinks one night I returned to my room to find that $200USD had gone missing from the safe, unusually not the entire amount, and that nothing else had gone missing from the room. I reported the incident immediately to the night manager and he suggested that perhaps a lady of the night had stole my money, which of course was not the case as there was no lady of the night staying in my room!..
I then called my friend in the adjacent room and he also confirmed that $200USD had gone missing from his safe.
The very next morning we visited hotel security and found that the 24 hour surveillance video had been deleted in certain parts. As we were exiting the security office 5 other Australian tourists questioned us as to whether or not money had gone missing from our safe, as had with theirs!
It a short amount of time, the whole lobby was filled with international guests reporting the same findings.
We demanded to speak with the general manager and were conveniently informed that the GM would not return to the hotel until after we had left Thailand. Staff also refused to cooperate in providing us with the GM’s mobile phone contact details.
At this point our group of victims visited the tourist police only to be informed that this is not the first time this had happened at this particular hotel and that the police were finding it very difficult to lay any charges against the hotel.
The group then returned to the lobby of the hotel to await the arrival of the police detectives which took the most part of four hours. We asked if we could make a call through to the police at reception and were told that we would have to pay extra to make a cheap local call, certainly no customer service whatsoever.
Finally the detectives arrived and we sat through a session of the daily surveillance video footage taken outside of my room. While the detectives did not question the number of deleted passages of footage, one particular piece of footage had not been deleted and mistakenly overlooked by the syndicate of criminal hotel employees.
The footage involved a house maid arriving at the entrance of my room with no cleaning utensils, entering my room, spending about 10 to 15 minutes in my room (clearly helping herself to my safe) then walking out suspiciously with the contents of my safe wrapped in a towel and not returning to my room. At this point, the detectives informed us that they would take the room maid down to the police station for further questioning.
The detectives simply escorted her to the front entrance of the hotel and at this point the detectives left the scene while we witnessed the house maid remain within the hotel compound.
The group of tourists were simply outraged by this. We stocked up on local beers and set up shop in the lobby of the hotel informing every other hotel guest of the incident and warning them against the risk of leaving money in the room safe.
The hotel F&B manager, security staff and even hotel tour operator accused us of being liars, threatened to smash bottles over our faces and then called the riot police.
Riot police (that looked more like thugs in police uniforms) arrived and also threatened us, pressuring the group to check out of the hotel A.S.A.P.
Clearly the hotel is well connected with local police and this system of fleecing tourists seems to have been established quite some time ago.
We clearly have no rights, the hotel is not accepting any responsibility and is clearly involved in a criminal racket of stealing money from tourists. The tourist police are simply corrupt and of no use.
Upon returning to Beijing I intend on writing to local media to warn tourists about the risks of staying in low-medium budget accomodation if visiting Phuket over the holiday season.
This really has left me with a bad taste of Thailand and I do not intend on EVER returning.
