I love giving reviews to support small local places that don’t have money and means for online ads. However, there’s an even more important aspect to reviews: preventing people from unknowingly stumbling into (very) bad experiences. This is especially important when you are a single traveler, and the local law enforcement might not be on-par with pursuing and closing down places that allow sexual misconduct.
Ubud, Bali is a lovely destination that gets frequented by millions of tourists every year. People come here for self-improvement, Yoga, spirituality, monkeys, food, and: massages. There are many wonderful restaurants, temples, and spas in Ubud. But places that have such a high tourist frequency can also attract shady businesses. Tourism is complicated.
Where there is money to be made, some people try to make it quickly - and quality can severely suffer in such cases. Often tourists are the only people using a service that is overpriced for local customers. Tourists stay for a limited time, and they have no knowledge (nor proper time) to go through the often intelligible local law enforcement systems. Therefore, bad stuff can happen and stay undiscovered.
I’ve recently witnessed such a situation when a friend of mine got a massage by herself and got sexually assaulted by a male massagist.
She received absolutely no support from the staff - they continuously downplayed what happened and refused to hand over the contact information of a supervisor. Our first attempts to contact the police were in vain since no one who picked up the phone spoke any English.
If we’d been normal tourists here, this is where it might have ended. We’d be in Ubud for a one-day trip, or maybe a few days, and the assault would have remained unreported - both to the owner of the massage studio, as well as the police. Like this, the malpractice could easily continue.
The place in question did not show up when zooming in on google maps - we wondered whether the listing had been removed? But by searching for it directly, we could find it. The place has so many bad reviews, some of them pointing to similar experiences like the one my friend had to live through. We wondered whether Google Maps takes places off the map search if they have too many negative reviews? It would have been helpful to find the place and read over the feedback they received to avoid setting foot in there.
In any case, we wanted to take a step to make a difference. At first, we did the only thing that short-term travelers could do to warn others: leave a review of the place and hope that people check those first before deciding!
Luckily we’re spending more time here in Ubud and therefore were able to visit two different police stations. The local officers were very friendly and understanding and found us English speaking policemen who supported us along the path of first retrieving the phone number of the owner and, after that proved ineffective, also filing an official complaint. We hope that this will at the minimum cause A TON of troubles for the spa so that the responsible massagist will be fired and acts like this won’t be taken lightly anymore in the future.
What I learned from this experience, is that reading reviews that other people left can make a big difference in avoiding very bad experiences. Also that it can be extremely helpful for others to leave those reviews, despite the fact that it is such a personal and difficult situation to speak about.
Building on a global review system can help to prevent individual situations of sexual assault, and maybe even drive bad places out of business, also in countries with a high tourist turnover and a review system that is not strongly established.
I’d love to speak to people working in the Google Guides program to see what can possibly be done to help leverage our Google Guides hive mind and agglomerated experience to protect individuals from such negative experiences.