[Teever]

What happens if a tourist refuses to pay the fee? Or asks for resolution by a neutral third party like law enforcement?

Seems like a kind of practice that could quickly become impractical if people simply DDOS it by disputing it.

[AlecSchueler]

> if people simply DDOS

DDOS attacks are only "simple" when you can easily coordinate all of the distributed peers. In this case one or two people doing it might be a small annoyance but they're going to have a hard time convincing all the other tourists to turn their trip into a political direct action.

[Teever]

This is an odd response. I've been to countries that have special tourist police trained in english who frequent tourist locations to prevent this kind of behaviour.

I've never experienced it personally but I've heard stories from other travellers who said that they actually went and got a cop to mediate a despite like this and the cop reamed the merchant out and made him apologize in front of other customers and hand the disputed money back.

Some places understand that perpetuating this kind of fraud against an evergreen pool of tourist marks while lucrative to the individual is ultimately damaging to the whole commons that is the tourist industry for the region.

[flyingshelf]

I'm afraid that police wouldn't do a thing if a practice is widespread and accepted by most. Legally speaking it's not a scam because it's not a hidden charge.

The 3% credit card charge on the other hand... but I'd rather pay cash than confront the poor cashier.

I will just respond with a 1-star review.

[AlecSchueler]

The police are paid and trained to organise against crime. That's quite different than disconnected tourists beginning to organise, which was the idea I responded to.

[flyingshelf]

It's printed on the menu so it's effectively legal, just dishonest.

> What happens if a tourist refuses to pay the fee?

Just about what would happen if you refuse to pay the bill, most likely you'll end up being shared on some Facebook group or worse.