salgud wrote:
> Gregory Morrow wrote:
> > It reminds me of visiting Communist countries during the 70's, they
often
> > had one (low) price for the locals for stuff (train and air fares,
museum
> > admissions, hotels, etc.) and an inflated price ("payable in convertible
> > currency") for folks visiting from capitalist lands...
> >
> > I think some places e.g. Russian, Cuba, India, etc. still have this kind
of
> > pricing for some things...
> >
> >
> > --
> > Best
> > Greg
>
> Are you kidding? You must not travel very much, or pay close attention.
> Most tourist places I've been, both in and out of the US, have 2 sets
> of prices. One for locals, one for outsiders. The posted/published
> prices are for the tourists. But everyone in town knows what the locals
> pay, espeically at restaurants.
I'm talking about places that set these prices by government fiat, not
commercial offers. The prices for locals are set lower because local wages
are generally lower. In the case of the Communist countries I was talking
about, some of these services (hotels, etc.) were not available to locals at
*all* because the locals were forbidden from even having "convertible"
currency (dollars, francs, west marks, pounds, etc.). East Germany, for
example, had a whole chain of deluxe hotels called "Interhotels" set aside
exclusively for the use of hard currency Western tourists. If you were a
Westerner, you stood in a separate ticket line at the Reiseburo der DDR
travel agency and paid a much higher price in hard currency for their
services...it was pretty much the same in the USSR, China, etc. Everyone
purchasing such services was always required to show their internal
passport/ID card/passport so there was no way a Westerner could get away
with avoiding paying the higher prices...
In the old East Germany or USSR it was absolutely impossible to get a
tourist visa to visit the place (except a day visa if you were visiting from
West Berlin) unless you booked and paid for the requisite number of hotel
nights first, only then would you be given a visa. I stayed in a friend's
flat in Dresden but I was *required* to pay $40.00/night (this was 1978) to
"stay" in an Interhotel - an Interhotel in which I never even used the bed.
This was a way not only to extort hard currency from "rich" Westerners, it
was a way for the Stasi or KGB or whatever (secret police) to track a
visitor's movements...
Czechoslovakia was a bit less dire, you could get a visitor's visa for a
length of stay and upon your arrival in that country you were simply
required to pay something like $15.00 per day in hard currency which was
exchanged and given back to you in Czech Crowns ("minimum daily exchange
requirement" I think was the phrase; and this was at the nonsensical
"official" rate of exchange: $1.00 per 6 Czech Crowns, not the much more
equitable black market rate of around $1.00 = 30.00 cks. Money in these
places really was "funny money" in the truest sense of the word ). No
nonsense with hotel bookings, etc., you were free to go where you wished and
stay where you wished, you could pay in Czech crowns for everything...same
scheme respectively for Hungary and Poland. Those places weren't so closed
and paranoid...
Cuba still operates like the old East Germany/USSR, if you're Canadian or
European or whatever you are segregated because you'll be paying most
everything with your hard Western currency, in fact there is no need to
change your Loonies or Euros or Yen into domestic Cuban pesos at all, there
is very little for a capitalist visitor to even buy using domestic pesos.
Cubans have a whole different and lower price structure for everything, from
transport to food to hotels. As a capitalist visitor, you will generally
not be able to avail yourself of any of these services/products in any case.
Cubans likewise cannot even enter hotels, restos, resorts, etc. that are
reserved for "rich" capitalist tourists, armed guards are there to stop them
(and many Cubans have the dollars to patronise these places -- *if* they
were given the chance; they can however spend all they want in the
government "dollar shops" buying desirable goods) It's a form of "dollar
apartheid" -- and social control. Castro is not only hungry for dollars but
also paranoid...
IIRC in Russia museum entry prices still may be structured like this; there
are similar price schemes
AFAIK for services/goods in less developed places
like India, etc...and of course there lots of places everywhere that offer
lower - priced services/goods to qualified groups like kids or pensioners,
etc., e.g. some local transport in the UK is cheap/free for UK pensioners
and so on. In Russia I think every form of transport (from buses to planes)
was/is absolutely free to disabled vets of the "Great Patriotic War"
(WWII)...those vets preferentially went to the head of the line (a fine idea
IMNSHO).
As for your example of "posted" restaurant prices, I think that's more of an
example of simply avoiding tourist traps that post their menus at places
like the Spanish Steps in Rome or Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco or
South Street Seaport in NYC or Navy Pier here in Chicago, etc. The locals in
any case wouldn't be caught dead in such joints :-)
--
Best
Greg