Friday, September 25, 2009

The problem of Free

whenever I travel or visit places, I'm always aghast at the prices for services and amenities. However, recently I found a place in which recreation activities are provided free of charge.
This place is a resort where canoeing, archery, basketball and beach volleyball are provided free of charge. I chose the place specifically because of the free as I remembered once before we had so much fun canoeing and doing archery.
To my dismay, I found that the 2 person canoe were out of commission. Only the one man canoe was available, but the fun was in joyriding with the kids. We`couldn't swim coz someone just got stung by jelly fish and the red flags were up.
We decided to do archery, but the arm guard had seen better days and and the arrows had lost their little guide feathers (believe me, they expected us to use the arrows without the feathers) and finger taps were not avalable.
The target? it was in shreds. Since we weren't competing, we didn't care too much about it.
In the end we paid RM16 bucks for two rounds of shooting practice with a paintball gun. At RM8 for 10 pellets, I guess I'm kinda glad the gun worked.
At the end of it, you may say that I shouldn't be complaining about the equipment 'coz its free, but in all honesty, the hotel isnt that cheap and I do believe that included in my rates would be the cost of maintaining these equipment.
Throwing these as free does increase the image of the hotel, for people who travel with kids of varied interests, but when they don't meet the expectation of free, then the idea of short term, profit hungry multinational company comes to mind.
Definitely, in my family's eyes, we're not likely to patronize this hotel chain ever.