Scams; helping you part with your money- part 2

Adding value; touts and commission

Commission is less ubiquitous than overcharging, but has the capacity to be far more annoying and expensive.

The scenario is that rickshaw drivers, taxis and touts are paid either a flat rate amount or a percentage of the sale (or often both) to take you to a particular hotel, shop or occasionally restaurant.

The amount paid by handicrafts shops is surprisingly high; in Delhi "emporiums" will often pay 100rs to a driver just for taking you there, if you buy something he additionally gets around 15% of the sale on top. In major cities you can use this to advantage and do a deal with the driver; a free or cut price sightseeing tour of so many hours in exchange for you visiting so many shops.

Jaipur, with its myriad jewellery and stone shops, and Agra with its marble shops are notorious commission hotspots. Kashmiri shop owners (the crack "Special forces" of the retail business) rely heavily on commissioned touts for getting trade.

I recall sitting in the shop of some Kashmiri friends and watching the monthly commission payments being divvied out to the touts in cash. The number of bills changing hands was absolutely staggering and one guy was handed 17,000 rupees for a months worth of dragging gullible tourists in, and that was only a very average month. All this simply for bringing in the punters, not running the shop, Good money in a country where earning 2000 rupees a month is considered a good wage.

If you are out to buy stuff in a taxi or rickshaw never let the driver see which shop you are going to, unless you wish to pay an over inflated price to cover his commission. Claims that the shop is owned by the drivers cousin or other relative are invariably bull. The fact is that commission money comes from somewhere; invariably the punters in the end.

In some towns where hotels pay good commission rates to touts and rickshaw wallahs, the result is getting mobbed by slavering lunatics the second you step off the bus or train, some trying forcibly to grab your luggage and drag you to the guest house of their choice. A rickshaw driver doing this will probably overcharge you as well as take commission from some bug infested pit.

Kanyakumari is the "religious tourist" town at the southernmost point of India. We arrived by motorbike and were mobbed by touts every time we stopped. One particular guy would run on foot from hotel to hotel after us (we had already told him we weren’t interested in his "help"), then appear at the counter just when Kirsten was enquiring about the price. We returned to the hotel after chasing the guy halfway down the street to find the price was now half what it was when he "took" us to the hotel.

Another such spot is Kovalam in Kerala, where we were relentlessly pursued by insistent touts. Most major cities have this to some degree or another, but the sophisticated big city tricks are usually a world apart from those of smaller towns.