Roz Pho Booked A Chalet In Switzerland For $15K And Only Realised It Was A Scam When She Got There
Over the past week or so, Tanglin star Roz Pho has been happily flaunting gorgeous snaps from her getaway to Switzerland with her husband Yohei Ueno, but the entire trip hasn’t exactly been a bed of roses.
For starters, the 38-year-old actress, who is around five months pregnant, woke up in Zurich on December 22 to the news that ticket sales for VTL flights into Singapore would be frozen until January 20 this year due to the rising number of imported COVID-19 cases.
And they only bought one-way tickets.
In a WhatsApp interview with 8days.sg, Roz explained that the reason they didn’t book a return flight was ‘cos Yohei, who’s in logistics, had to go to Germany for work, but they weren’t sure if they were going to be able to enter the country amidst the ever-changing restrictions.
“So we just bought a one-way ticket to Switzerland with no plans on how long we were going to be there,” said Roz, who is now in Germany. “We basically had to YOLO for a lot of things ‘cos it was impossible to plan. It was a very confusing time.”
They’ll only be able to book a VTL flight back to Singapore after the 20th
That was far from the only problem they faced.
On Friday (Jan 7), Roz took to IG Stories again to document her travel party’s ordeal after they got swindled by the website that they used to book their accommodation in the town of Zermatt.
Roz told us that she and Yohei had originally intended to book a seven-bedroom chalet — which was found to be legit — as there were supposed to be more friends joining them on the trip, but they backed out at the last minute.
As they were scrambling to find a smaller place, a friend of Roz’s cousin, who was also travelling with them, said he found a four-bedroom chalet “with a decent price for Zermatt”, which is known to be an expensive area.
Now, most other tourists would probably want to inspect the website or read reviews, but Roz admitted that she and Yohei “didn’t check anything” as they were “busy in Singapore” and “trusted” the guy who found the place for them ‘cos he’s Swiss.
Perhaps that wasn’t the best idea
Unfortunately, that turned out to be a big mistake.
While en route from Kandersteg to Zermatt, the Swiss friend suddenly asked Yohei if he had the address ‘cos — cue suspense music — the woman who was supposed to arrange their pick-up had ghosted them for days.
“Alarm bells start ringing at this point,” Roz recalled in her IG Stories post, adding that she couldn’t find “a single article” about their chalet on Google and that searching for the booking website brought up two “hits on it being a scam”.
Even taxi drivers told them they had “never heard of that place” when they tried to flag a cab to the chalet.
Not a very promising sign
Another “red flag”, Roz pointed out during our interview, was the invoice that showed that the booking was done through a UK website — which was strange since the chalet was supposed to be located in Switzerland — and the fact that the bank transfer was made to “a sole owner” instead of an agency.
“So the money is gone,” sighed Roz, sharing that the chalet cost 10,000 euros (about S$15,000) and hinting that the Swiss friend who recommended the place had offered to bear the full amount that was lost.
“He felt responsible ‘cos he booked everything and maybe he didn’t do proper checks, but he was pretty generous and went, ‘It’s okay, I made a mistake, it’s a scam, I learned my lesson’, and that was that.”
Always do your research before making a booking
Thankfully, they weren’t left with “nowhere to stay on that cold winter night” in a foreign country as the resourceful Yohei was able to find (trustworthy) accommodations for the rest of their time in Zermatt.
Oh, and if you’re wondering which deceitful page and fake chalet it was so you can avoid the same fate, we’ve got you covered.
“The website was ‘one chalet dot com’ — or ‘one chalets dot com’, I can’t remember — and the chalet was called Apartment Elina,” said Roz.
Yohei found this decent hotel for their first night in Zermatt
The group later moved to this cosy cabin
That whole saga still wasn’t the end of it.
Roz revealed that on December 31, Yohei had gotten into an accident while snowboarding on the Italian side of the Matterhorn and had to be airlifted to a hospital back in Switzerland.
She was unable to visit him as he was 1.5 hours away and she didn’t feel comfortable entering a hospital during the pandemic, especially since she’s pregnant (which also explains why she didn’t join him snowboarding in the first place).
As a result, they spent New Year’s Eve apart as Yohei needed to have an operation on his broken wrist at 2am on New Year’s Day.
On the bright side, she thinks their travel insurance should be able to cover the hospitalisation and surgery fees, which amounted to about 12,000 Swiss Francs (S$17,700).
“I cannot stress enough the importance of getting travel insurance,” she declared.
And now, she knows the importance of reading reviews too.
Let’s hope that’s the end of their travel woes
Photos: Roz Pho/Instagram
