In this episode of Sailing A B Sea a spur of the moment trip gets us involved in a hotel scam in Istanbul and we realise that in a city of 15 million people ...

Closed Captions (CC):
So the hotel that you can see behind us, scam - watch out for and we'll tell you

all about it

It's now 8:30 on Saturday morning, we

are on the coach that's gonna take us to

Dalaman Airport, it's going to take about

two hours on the coach and we'll spend

an hour on the airplane and then we'll

spend another two hours on the other

side getting to our destination. So 1/5

of our travel time is in the air 4/5

on road it's quite exciting, it's really exciting.

It took two hours to drive to Dalaman Airport

we've just checked in, we've got one hour before the flight boards and we're about to go through security

for a second time into the departure

lounges.

We're in Istanbul airport and the next

leg of the journey now getting to the

hotel which should take another two hours

so we've got to find a machine that sells

these little tickets - travel cards so we can

go on all sorts of travel methods and find our way to where we're going. Yeah.

Okay. Right Let's do it.

We made it to the bus station just

outside the airport and Baz is now just

about to get an Istanbul card which will

hopefully help us to get from A to B as many times as we want. So let's see how this goes. You can buy

Istanbul card from this menu

Please wait, insert only banknote. Your

request graded successfully loaded. 24 Lira on there now.

It was a great train. That was pretty good, it's very easy to follow, they even have instructions

written in English and spoken in English

and it's just very simple. Next I think

we're getting on Marmaray tram from

Asia to Europe

Two continents in one day oh! Let's go.

Can I help. No it's okay

Tesekkuler (thanks). You're welcome

This is why it pays to read reviews and

heed what the reviews say. Yeah, We'll tell you

all about it later.

Yeah we'll pull some of the reviews up

on the screen and we'll show them to you. Why we didn't see them or didn't pay

attention to them I don't know because

we normally do

So I'm now on the telephone to Expedia

to get them to organise a free

cancellation and a refund and then

contact the guys at the hotel Milano

and then we've got to go and find

somewhere else for three nights.

So the hotel you can see

behind us, scam. Watch out for it.

As we mentioned earlier we're normally quite cautious

when booking hotels and we always check

reviews and if the reviews are

outstandingly bad then we decide not to

go to that particular location however

in this case the trip to Istanbul was

thought up in a very short space of time

and booked in a very quick sequence of

time. It was only after we'd booked that we

found out that the hotel had very

scathing reviews. One person even calling

it a scam and describing the scam so we

actually were forewarned and forearmed

when we went to the hotel. We had our

fingers crossed that it wasn't a scam

but when we got there it turned out it

was because one of the brothers the two

Milano brothers that owned it, used the

exactly the same line on us as he'd used

on a previous guest - the fact that oh

we're very sorry there's a problem with

your room the the bathroom has had a

burst pipe and the whole room is flooded

and we've got no extra rooms. Now we

knew that because that's what one

previous reviewer had revealed, but then

surprisingly five minutes after that the

other Milano brother came up and said

yes there's been a problem, the whole

fifth floor is flooded, somebody left a

big window open and it rained very

heavily and all the rain blew in so the

whole floor is flooded. I wish they get

the stories straight. So how the scam

works is you book this particular hotel

which has some great pictures on the

internet and when you get there they

tell you that the room is not available

for whatever reason. They then try and

ring around to

friends hotels to get you into one of

those, of course let's just use imaginary

numbers here, let's say that the Milano

hotel is a hundred and fifty dollars a

night

they will then book you into a scummy

$70 a night hotel that one of their

friends owns in a very dodgy part of

town and very poor amenities, and of

course they split the difference. Another

thing they do is they try and say to you

well you can apply for a refund after

you get home just phone up the

company you booked through and they'll

supply a refund, at which point when a

refund is applied for the Milano Hotel

says sorry we have a no refunds policy

so you don't get your money back. We

decided that we weren't leaving the

hotel until we'd had a phone call to

Expedia who we booked through and

organised a complete refund. At first

they said that their telephones couldn't

do International dialling. I explained to

them that my Turkish sim couldn't do

international dialling either so they'd

have to find a phone somewhere that did

international dialling. Five minutes later

one of the Milano brothers wandered in

with a handset which he'd borrowed from

one of the neighboring businesses or

hotels, I don't know, handed it to me and

said you can dial internationally on

this one. I had a chat with the lady, very

nice lady at Expedia, explained the

situation and she said, just hold on a

second I'll call them. Now at this point

I am sitting literally ten metres away

from reception, their phone rings the

Milano brother picks it up

I hear him have a conversation in

English, at which he agrees to supply

of full refund and he puts the phone

down. The lady I'm on hold with comes

back on the line that says, thank you sir

we've organised that for you.

I said yes I was listening to your

conversation, and we got a full refund. We

then asked the Milano brothers if they'd

be courteous enough to allow us to plug

into their electricity to recharge our

phone and plug in our laptop while we

did an online search using their

internet connection to book another

hotel. Now here's where a bit of

stupidity on my behalf comes in. I found

a hotel with in the same price bracket

only two kilometres walk away which

wasn't too far and it was in this part

of town that we wanted to be in for

seeing the sites that we wanted to see

so I booked the dates got the

confirmation number and we packed up

everything and exited

the Milano hotel and begun our two

kilometre trek across Istanbul. When we

got to the newly booked hotel I gave

them the reference number and they

looked and looked and looked and

couldn't find a booking at all. It was

only after about ten minutes and a

couple of managers getting involved that

somebody eagle-eyed spotted the fact

that I've made a mistake of booking it

for next month. Now this weekend happened

to be a very busy weekend in Istanbul it

was a national holiday weekend and

pretty much all of the hotels were fully

booked.

Once again we plugged in our phones to

recharge, brought out our trusty laptop

and looked again for another hotel. This

time I didn't book it online, I phoned

reception. I said I see that you have one

double room left, the guy on the end of

the phone said yes we do. I said

right hold that room, we'll be there in

20 minutes.

This place was only a kilometer and a

half walk away. When we wandered into

his reception he said hello, I said I was

on the telephone to you 20 minutes ago,

you said he had one double room left. Yes

he said. I said great can we have it? He said, do you have a reservation? I said no I

talked to you on the phone about this. Oh

in that case we're fully booked, and then

gave me an attitude that says, not my

problem, I don't care. At this point we

decided that booking online was wasting

a lot of time, night was beginning to

fall outside and we just wanted to get a

hotel. As we'd been criss crossing our

way through Istanbul we had spotted that

there are pretty much hotels every five

paces, so we decided to just wander into

receptions and ask. The first two

places we tried - fully booked and on the

third attempt we wandered into the

reception area of a very nice hotel

called Darkhill and it was in the

perfect location for where we wanted to

visit all the sights. The nice manager of

the reception said normally we're fully

booked but I keep two rooms available

for nice people and you look like nice

people, how long do you want the room for?

We said three nights and paid the man

quite happily.

Oh this is lovely. I'll have the small bed ... she said sitting on the large bed

Uh-huh. Oh boy.

Nice shower, nice bathroom, complimentary

toiletries, this is what we look like

after walking all over Istanbul

for four hours.

We've seen a lot of it already, we can just stay in the hotel! We've walked past most of it at least twice! Yep

Oh boy we thought we

weren't going to get anywhere there for a while didn't we? We certainly did

So what have we learned from all this?

Well always read reviews on anything

you're booking whether it's a theme park

or restaurant or hotel and take heed of

the bad ones

don't just rely that there are 70% good

ones. We learned that persistence finally

pays off and we've also learned that

there's always a mixed bag of nice

people and not so nice people in any big

city. But we really did enjoy our time in

Istanbul

After a great night's sleep

we left the hotel in search of somewhere

to have breakfast before exploring Istanbul.

Right we've got full bellies. We had pide - it was so fresh and so fluffy it was yummy wasn't it?

Beautiful. So one of the things we're

going to get when we get to the first

place is a 70 lira per person, valid for

one year, Museum Pass and because they

charge you to go into each different

place you buy this pass if you get

into every place for a total of 70 lira. So that's good. You

have to have a resident's card to qualify

for it or be a Turkish citizen. Here we

are at the Hagia Sophia (Topkapi Palace) and it's

probably close to lunchtime now and if

you look behind me you can see the queue

to purchase tickets and one of the

tickets that we want to acquire is

bought at the same place. So we've looked

at the queue and we estimated based on

the number of ticket sales booths that

were open, that we probably be in the

queue for over an hour and then there's

a queue to get into the building itself

So we've had a rethink. We can buy this

card for an annual pass for all the

museums at any one of the museum's so we

need to find one that's got a small

queue, buy the card and then we can just

wander in to each one as we please, but

right now on our search for one of those

empty kiosks, we're going to have a

wander down to the Bosporus.

Just a little bit of current running

through there would you say? That thing

over there is the Galata Tower and we're

going to cross this bridge by foot

and go up there and take a look. It's

just after midday and the ferries just

keep coming and going.

Just a small queue

We're not going up today. No way Manuel!

Do join us next week as we explore the

fascinating city of Istanbul and visit

some of its exotic and ancient

attractions.

We are currently anchored in

a bay on the Greek island of Samos in a

town called Pythagoria and if you went

to school you will probably know about

the famous guy called Pythagoras who was

born in Samos. He was and we're gonna be

here for quite some time editing some

videos together because we really do

need to do some work because we are

backlogged at the moment and we need to buy some time

It's strange making videos. But what we'd

like to do right now is say a big hello

and a big thank you to our brand new

patrons, Mark Bonnington. He has a 43 foot Bavaria which is

Marseille. Nice and from now on Mark

Bonnington will be known as Bonno.

Yep and also Flemming Sorenson yes

and Trevor Bench and SV Daisy. Thank you

so much for becoming patrons it's really

appreciated in making this journey of

ours sustainable. Welcome aboard thank you. So if

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See you next time. Bye