Newman Huo
THIRTY-NINE Beijing tourists have been stranded in Shenzhen after being refused from boarding a Taiwan-bound flight at Hong Kong airport.
All claim to have been cheated by a Shenzhen travel agency, Leyou Holiday.
At a press conference yesterday, the Shenzhen Municipal Bureau of Culture, Sports and Tourism asked the tourists to return to Beijing and file a complaint with the Beijing tourism authority, after an investigation was unable to find any trace of the existence of Leyou Holiday.
On Friday, the bureau was told by the Travel Industry Council of Hong Kong that 39 Beijing tourists were attempting to fly to Taiwan via Hong Kong airport, but none was holding a legal travel permit for Taiwan.
The Beijing tourists said they entered Hong Kong under the arrangement of the Shenzhen Leyou Holiday Travel Agency, and that a tour guide named Jiao would take care of their travel permits and air tickets to Taiwan.
The tourists were sent by Hong Kong authorities to Shenzhen on Saturday.
The Shenzhen bureau said subsequently that it could find neither Leyou Holiday nor a tour guide named Jiao in the city.
The bureau also found that all the Beijing tourists were leaving the Chinese mainland on visas to Indonesia. However, they were all holding air tickets to Taiwan but without travel permits to the island. They may have been defrauded, a bureau statement said.
The tourists have neither gone through legal channels nor joined tour groups with legal travel agencies to go to Taiwan, and can provide no proof, such as a contract or receipts from any travel agency. So their legal rights cannot be protected, said Chen Biao, an official with the bureau. The tourists would have to take the matter to the Beijing tourism bureau as the Shenzhen bureau has no jurisdiction over tour arrangements made in other cities, Chen said.
The bureau provided board and lodging for those Beijing tourists who stayed in Shenzhen over the weekend.
