Hong Kong to address city’s poor service quality in star-studded campaign

Hong Kong will roll out a campaign to address notoriously poor quality services by encouraging residents to go the extra mile to be visitor-friendly, recruiting film stars such as Louis Koo Tin-lok and Stephy Tang Lai-yan for the push.

The campaign will feature a near-two-minute video in which the pair, along with former Hong Kong swimmer Kevin Chu Kam-yin and actor Tony Wu Tsz-tung, play different roles to show how a diner, a waiter, a salesman and a taxi driver could make a difference at a restaurant, a shop and on a taxi ride.

The campaign, hailed by the Hong Kong Tourism Board, will be launched officially on Monday, followed by a taxi union’s plan to kick off its own service improvement initiative on June 5.

Other TV personalities such as Jessica Hsuan, Nancy Sit and Dao Tai-yu will be ambassadors for retailers, restaurants and taxi drivers respectively.

“The campaign is called Let’s go the Extra Mile, which we aim to deliver a message that if everyone does a little thing extra, we can make a difference to others,” Samantha Fan Man-wah, the board’s general manager for marketing , said.

Since Hong Kong reopened its border for travellers at the beginning of last year, visitors – mostly from mainland China – said that their dining, travelling and shopping experiences left much to be desired.

Rude waiters or waitresses at restaurants and unscrupulous taxi drivers were among top complaints on social media site Xiaohongshu, regarded as the mainland’s online bible for travel.

Official statistics showed that complaints and suggestions in taxi services were 52.8 per cent higher in 2023 at 11,096 from 2022, with cab drivers refusing a hire and overcharging passengers among top complaints.

In the first scene of the video, Koo plays a diner who walks into a busy cha chaan teng while another diner Tang takes away her handbag to offer a seat to him. Wu, playing a waiter, takes orders from the pair who make various demands for iced lemon tea, to the patient waiter.

Another key part of the video shows actor Koo rushing towards a red cab while talking on his mobile phone to actress Hsuan. He cannot figure out how to get to his destination – via Queen’s Road Central or Queen’s Road West – and Hsuan has no idea how to give him directions.

Seeing Koo, the taxi driver, played by Chu, pushes a button to open his cab door for Koo and points his air-conditioning vents towards a sweating Koo. The latter then passes his phone to Chu who works out the destination with Hsuan.

Before Koo gets out of the taxi, Chu cheerfully reminds him not to forget to his belongings.

“We want to show examples of little things that people can do to make the world a better place,” the Tourism Board’s general manager Fan said.

Asked if the video did not go far enough to address the most serious complaints of taxi drivers in cherry-picking and overcharging passengers, the board’s executive director Dane Cheng Ting-yat praised the video for taking an encouraging approach rather than a critical one to address the issues.

Fan said the campaign was different from its courtesy campaign in 1997 which featured singers Andy Lau Tak-wah, Cass Phang.

That campaign’s slogan of “today’s service attitude like this is unacceptable” was more critical and did not take a positive approach, explained Fan, saying the new campaign reflected changes in culture and societal norms over the years.