Examples of higher prices charged to tourists vs. locals

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The sign you're looking for:

enter image description here

(source - although the image weirdly isn't showing up there, the post is, and I found it through google image search, but giving the site credit anyway)

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It's common enough in Australia, with very sensible reasoning behind it - the tourists are only going to visit your attraction once. The locals can keep coming back (and often bringing visitors as extras) because they don't have the travel cost.

Skyrail is an example that springs to mind. Although they don't advertise it on their website, they have offered discounted local rates in the past (verified here and here).

There aren't as many examples down here as there used to be because companies have moved on to the concept of an annual pass, equivalent in price to two or three regular visits, e.g. these guys who used to offer local rates in years past.

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This is very common in Thailand, so much so that there's an entire website devoted to the topic: 2PriceThailand.com.

This is particularly easy to do in Thailand, since the Thai script has a native set of numerals. This means you can have ENTRANCE 100 BAHT right next to the Thai sign saying ๒๐ บาท, and the vast majority of farang visitors won't even realize they're getting charged five times more!

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It used to be very common in China. One time I had been there long enough that I read the Chinese price on a sign first without paying attention to the English, and handed over the (I thought) appropriate amount. The poor girl had to explain that I had to fork over 10x as much as a gweilo.

These days the price seems to have gone up at most places to the same (high) price for everyone.

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In this museum in India, different fees are charged for Indians versus foreigners (₹10/150), and there's a fee for using a camera (₹50), which foreigners are more likely to do than locals. I assume that fees are based on the ability to pay, and foreigners are more likely to be able to pay more.

At Yuransen Onsen in Japan, there were different onsens for Japanese people and non-Japanese people. Japanese people were charged 360 yen, whereas non-Japanese people were charged 2500 yen (though that included renting a bath towel, a bathrobe, and a pair of bathing trunks). However, as a white tourist, I've never experienced discrimination at onsens, or in anything other than the adult industry in Japan.

My assumption is that most differences in pricing won't be because of direct discrimination, but due to indirect issues. Things like having to stay at a higher-quality hotel because it has multilingual staff, or choosing tourist-oriented transportation because you wouldn't know how to use public transport.

If you're after a picture of discriminatory pricing, you can find one by doing a google image search for "orange Naranja price sign", hosted on a very spammy site. But don't trust viral images spreading across the internet. They're usually fake, or out of context.

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