Thursday, January 26, 2023
6:15 a.m. Room 4, Tengkong Kost
(SPOT ON 91950 Guest House TekNong Syariah)
Bangkinan, Sumatra, Indonesia
The time appears to have finally come for this foreigner to get on his bicycle and attempt “Riding SOLO in the dangerous Sumatran mountains (I nearly DIED!!).” I’m not moving fast this morning, and I don’t have any plans to be on the road before the sun comes up. I’m hoping to stay casual in my mood and in my cycling today. For all I know, it will be pouring rain soon and I’ll extend my stay in Bangkinan again. Through the tiny slit windows in my bathroom, I can see a bit of the sky and there is nothing but cloud out there.
Today could be a very important day. It all depends on how my knee feels. Assuming I depart, my plan is to ride forty kilometers. And that sounds like a short distance. But it will likely all be uphill. And that’s not a great way to introduce my knees back to cycling. However, I don’t have a choice. That’s where the road takes me. It will be significant to see what happens with my knees. If my left knee starts to hurt badly right out of the gate, that will probably signify the end of the trip. It will certainly be the end of the cycling trip. If my knee starts to hurt badly, I will probably just turn around and coast back down to Bangkinan. I will give up on any attempt to reach Bukittinggi by bicycle.
If I do return to Bangkinan, I will almost certainly end up in a different hotel or guest house. I had a funny moment with the son of this homestay family yesterday. He is my main contact here when it comes to this room and paying for it. I have been booking the room through Agoda just for the convenience. When I go outside my room, there is never anyone around at the hotel, so there is no one I could talk to about extending my stay anyway. There is no hotel office or front desk. It’s a casual place. So I just do it through Agoda. It’s kind of like me sending them an email through Agoda signifying my desire to stay another night or two. They get the email or notification from Agoda, however that works. And then the son comes over and knocks on my door to get the extra money for each day. I have to top up my Agoda payment to reach the desired levels. Despite how weird it is, that is how the system works for them. I can book the room on Agoda at whatever price is listed. The price changes every day. And then the son comes over with a calculator app open on his phone and punches in the numbers to show me how much extra I have to pay in cash. It’s all very strange, but that’s how it works. And yesterday, he mentioned that they have family coming to the hotel today, and they might need my room for their family members. So, I may be looking for a new home no matter what happens today.
With that in mind, I tracked down another guest house here in Bangkinan yesterday. This is a place that I’d had my eye on in Bangkinan right from the beginning. It shows up in my Agoda searches, but it was always fully booked. It seemed like a much nicer place than where I am staying and was the same price. It’s called the Ameera Homestay. I could see where it was located on Google Maps, and I took a detour there yesterday to check the place out. Unfortunately, I couldn’t locate it. Then as I was leaving that street, two men greeted me, and they looked to be good informants. One of them was in a police uniform, and he spoke basic English. I chatted with them for a bit and answered all the usual questions. And then I asked them if they knew where the Ameera was. Next thing I knew, I was sitting on the back of the police officer’s scooter, and we were zooming to the opposite side of town. Not surprisingly, I guess, the Ameera’s location on Google Maps was completely wrong.
Also not surprisingly, my attempt to get information about room rates at the Ameera was very difficult. In my head, it was a simple question. I wanted to know if I was able to book a room at the Ameera through Agoda. And if I did so, would I have to pay extra? At first, I had hope that I could get clear answers. The Ameera was much larger and more official looking than I had expected. It wasn’t a simple family-run ramshackle guest house like where I’ve been staying. It seemed much more like a real hotel. There was even a large front desk, and a man sitting or standing behind it. And with my English-speaking police officer helping me out, I thought answers would be forthcoming. But, my goodness, was there chaos and confusion! You’d think I was asking for the unified field theory to explain the entire known and unknown universe.
The police officer and this man at the hotel had long in-depth conversations. Phone calls were made. Discussions continued for great lengths, interspersed with these phone calls. Occasional questions were thrown my way and these questions had nothing to do with the information I was trying to get. I don’t know where the miscommunication came in, but something got lost between my asking my question and them trying to answer it. And then came a point when the man behind the desk came out from his office and got out a bunch of keys and opened the door to a storage room. He went into the storage room and climbed up on a chair or a ladder. I can’t remember which it was. And he was rummaging around stacks of paper on an upper shelf. And I was wracking my brain trying to figure out what in the world he could be looking for up there. What could he possibly be trying to track down that had any connection with the question I had asked?
He finally found what he was looking for, and he pulled out a piece of paper from a big stack, and he handed this paper to the police officer, who showed it to me. It was a bit confusing, but on this paper there appeared to be a lot of information and contact numbers and email addresses related to Agoda. And then I think I finally started to understand the big picture. The man at the Ameera was under the impression that I had booked a room through Agoda. And the Ameera, just like so many hotels here, did not accept any online bookings despite being listed online. He thought I had already paid for a room, and he was telling me through the police officer that if I wanted to stay at the Ameera, I would have to pay again in cash. And the rate he quoted me was at least double the rate shown on Agoda. And if I had already booked and paid for a room through Agoda, that was clearly my problem, not theirs. They would happily keep the money, but it would not get me a room. The only way to get a room was to pay the full rate in cash at the desk. And any money I had already paid through Agoda would be my problem. I’d have to somehow arrange a refund from Agoda, and the Ameera had apparently dealt with this problem so much and for so long that they had printed up actual flyers to hand out to guests to tell them how to contact Agoda if they wished to request a refund. It was one of the more insane things I’ve come across.
I had a chance just now to do a bit more research, and it turns out the Ameera Homestay is listed on Google Maps twice. And that’s why I wasn’t able to find it on my own. There is one listing over here in my neighborhood just on the other side of the large mosque. That’s where I went, and that is the incorrect listing. But there is a second listing on the other side of town. That’s the real one, and that’s where the police officer brought me. Oddly enough, the listing that I tracked down has all the online booking information with prices indicated. The listing with the correct location and all the photos and customer reviews has no online sites listed.
The majority of the guest reviews are quite positive. And they refer to the hotel as a budget place offering good value. And the prices they mention are in line with the cash price that they quoted me yesterday. I saw just one very negative review, and this was from a person who booked and paid for a room through Traveloka. And the Ameera refused to give them a room unless they paid again, at a much higher rate, in cash. And I imagine they handed them the flyer about how to try to get a refund on their own.
I find all of this quite confusing. I don’t understand it at all. These hotel owners all talk as if they have no control over the online booking system. Yet, in my experience, that isn’t the case. I remember staying at a hotel in Thailand, and the owner told me that they planned to shut down for a few days. I was allowed to stay because I was already in a room there. But they wanted to take a little holiday and not have any new guests arrive. So she simply opened up their various online booking applications and shut them down. She clicked on a few buttons to indicate that they had no rooms available on Agoda or Booking or Traveloka. And that was the end of it. No one was able to book a room online for her hotel because she changed the number of available rooms to zero. I’ve been around enough hotels and gotten to know enough hotel owners that I’ve seen a lot of this kind of activity. Hotel owners have the ability to access their own accounts and adjust how many rooms are available and at what price. After all, it’s their hotel. So, why aren’t the owners of these hotels in Indonesia doing that? If they don’t want to accept online bookings, why don’t they just turn off the system? Why leave it up and running and allow guests to book rooms online? And if they aren’t happy with the prices being shown online, why don’t they just change the prices? Obviously, hotel owners can set their own room rates. Why can’t these Indonesian hotel owners do that?
I just did a brief Google search for Oyo and Indonesia, and it appears that there has been trouble with Oyo hotels in Indonesia for a long time. The pandemic hurt the company financially, it seems, and they’ve been struggling. There are lots of negative stories about Oyo: accepting payments and reservations for hotels that don’t even exist anymore; not paying contractors for work done; laying off most of their Indonesian staff; not issuing refunds, etc. And that explains a lot. But it still doesn’t explain why the Indonesian hotel owners don’t simply take action themselves.
I said that my plan was to keep today very casual. And it appears that I’m feeling so casual that, once again, I won’t be leaving at all. I think I’m just too nervous about my knee and about the weather and about everything. I’m enjoying a cup of coffee here in my room, and I think I’m going to stay in Bangkinan for another day and night. I might be able to stay in this room. If not, I will switch to the Ameera. I won’t book the room online, of course. I’ll just ride over there on my bike. The Ameera’s rooms are more expensive, but they should offer a lot more in the way of convenience, comfort, and amenities. I’m also assuming that their WiFi works. The lack of WiFi has been my biggest problem here at the TekNong. Nonexistent or extremely poor WiFi continues to be the bane of my existence, particularly my YouTube existence. During my time at the TekNong, I’ve ended up spending a ton of money because of that. I needed to upload videos to YouTube, and to do that, I starting hanging out at a fancy cafe drinking expensive coffee just so I could use their WiFi. And that didn’t even get the job done. Then I started buying more and more mobile data. I think I’ve spent more on mobile data than I have on this hotel room, and that’s insane. The point of staying in a simple place like the TekNong is to save money. But if they make you pay extra every day and then you have to pay for a constant stream of mobile data just to get online, it ends up costing a lot more than if you stayed at a nicer hotel from the beginning. And this lack of WiFi completely destroys my energy for shooting any video for YouTube. What’s the point of working hard on capturing interesting video and editing it when you can’t upload it?
11:02
The die has been cast, and I’ll be staying here at this homestay. The son of this family knocked on my door to inquire whether I was leaving or not. And even though their other family members are arriving today, he told me it would be okay for me to stay in this room. But he relayed a message from his mother that it would be much better for them if I didn’t book the room through Agoda anymore. They’d prefer if I just paid them in cash directly and skipped the middleman. Which I did. And I’m still on the hunt for any answers to the ongoing Oyo/Agoda mysteries, so I took the opportunity to quizz him a bit more about what was going on.
And I learned something that perhaps explains a little bit. I told him about my experience with hotels in Malaysia and Thailand where I witnessed the owners simply going onto Agoda and Booking and Traveloka and adjusting their information to whatever they wanted. The son and I had also discussed how his homestay, the TekNong, and the Ameera were both part of the Oyo family and both had the same problems. And I wondered why they didn’t just go into their accounts and set it so that no rooms were listed as available. For that matter, why not adjust the prices to their liking or cancel their online listings entirely? And he explained that they don’t deal directly with those sites. They deal only with Oyo. And Oyo controls their listings online. And if that’s true, that would explain a lot. They’re basically stuck and can’t do anything. And the hotels have chosen various strategies to deal with it. Places like the TekNong accept the online booking and then deduct the amount you paid through Agoda from their real price and charge you the difference in cash. Other places like Ameera Homestay in Bangkinang and B’rasco in Duri simply refuse to do anything. They won’t accept the online booking and insist you pay the full walk-in rate in cash. In those cases, I don’t know what happens to the amount you paid online. I’ve been assuming that the hotel gets that money anyway, and they are essentially (and illegally) charging you twice for the same room. But maybe Oyo pockets the cash before it reaches the hotel. And places like TekNong take the middle path and accept the online bookings but ask that you pay extra on top of that in person in cash when you arrive. It’s all a bit of a mess.