Saturday 11 April 2009

Travel Ethos (AKA Travel Ideas & Thailand / Bali Direct)

I / my company own a reservations site called "Travel Ethos". In 2006/7 when I no longer wanted to hold a bank account in Indonesia or Thailand (to collect direct hotel / villa commissions) rather than just "throw the money away" I decided to have it go to local children's charities in Bali and Thailand; the Bali Children's Project in Ubud Bali and the Mercy Center in Bangkok Thailand.

No problem you would have thought, a nice thing to do; but not much is nice in Bali!

Just before Christmas 2008 a very strange and nasty thing happened. The shortest, fattest, ugliest, most maligned and annoying expatriate in Bali, Roy Thompson, an ex-insurance admin supervisor (ouch), someone who has been accusing me of every crime under the Balinese sun for years, emailed me and accused me of defrauding the Bali charity.

How could I be defrauding them? The hotels and villas paid the charity's operational manager not me! Why would I defraud them? If I wanted the commission I need only have continued to take it! But this was lost on American Roy Thompson, who then did a really nasty thing and contacted the Thailand Mercy Center and told them I was defrauding them too!

Roy Thompson simply kept and keeps challenging me to produce accounts showing the money actually went to the charities, but this was between the hotels and the charities, all I had were copy statements showing the hotels / villas were told to pay the respective charities and emails from the various hotels / villas confirming when and what they had paid them; but he keeps "challenging" me for something I do and can not have, accounts / payment receipts which only the hotels and charities have. However, Roy Thompson, an alleged pot head and narcotics dealer (no surprise) married to an ex-Legian "night butterfly" who has been banned from every Indonesian related forum going, keeps claiming I had stolen this money! Thompson said the Bali Children's Project had told him this!

So I contacted John Cooke (Bali Children's Project or "BCP") but he refused to reply to me! So rather than find a new charity and have Roy Thompson email them with his nasty falsehoods, given something was clearly not right at the BCP, I decided to shut down Travel Ethos in January 2009; I have since re-launched it as a 100% pro-Balinese site (see Travel Ethos Bali).

After failing to get John Cooke to respond despite several attempts, I am currently going through a legal process to try and have the Bali Children's project produce accounts / receipts for the thousands of dollars donated to them by the hotels and villas in Bali, so far without success. It would seem the money was in fact stolen, but not by me! You see, John Cooke asked that I have the hotels / villas pay their commissions / donations to the operational manager directly. Yes, you can see where this is going, and I expect to have some news / be able to publish what happened to all this money soon.

Perhaps it should not surprise me but it still hurts and disgusts me that my, the hotels and villas goodwill was abused to one extent or another. In fact, I actually spent some of my own money on Travel Ethos with web developers to help it earn money for good causes in Bali and Thailand. It is surreal when you give money to a charity only to be accused of stealing it. It is horrible waking up to the prospect that the money you gave never actually went to the needy children in Bali it was intended for. I have learned my lesson, I will never trust Indonesian charities ever again.

Watch this space!

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