Tips for Dealing with Tourist Touts (Hustlers)

A tout is a person who tries to sell you something (a good or a service) in an importune manner. When traveling to Africa many travel agents will fail to give advice on how to deal with touts. You'll be advised about health, flights, tours -- but how to deal with persistent young men trying to sell you something is usually not covered.

To help you out, I've started this series: Tip 1 was "Assume Nothing is Free".

Tip 2: Hotels don't suddenly disappear, fill up or move to a bad location.

This tip is especially useful for the independent travelers. When you arrive at an African airport, bus station, train station or ferry port you will be greeted by many people, inquiring rather loudly, where you want to go to. Many of these folks will earn a commission for taking you to a hotel of their choosing. This doesn't mean that the hotel will necessarily be bad, it just means you may end up in an area you don't want to be in; the price of your room will be higher to cover the commission; or the hotel could indeed be quite nasty.

Hotel touts have figured lots of clever techniques to scare gullible tourists into following them to a hotel they earn commissions from. They may ask you what hotel you have booked and then tell you emphatically that that hotel is full, has moved or is in a bad area. Some hotel touts will go further and even pretend to call your hotel for you and get a friend on the phone to tell you the hotel is full.

Don't believe the hype. Make a reservation with a hotel before you arrive, especially if you're arriving in the evening and/or in a major tourist town. Your guide book will have phone numbers of all hotels they list, or you can research online before you go. Take a taxi and insist they take you to the hotel of your choosing. If your taxi driver pretends not to know the location of your hotel, take another taxi.

It's better to pay a little more for your first night in a town, than to end up somewhere you don't want to be.