Ben Groundwater is one of Australia's most experienced travel writers. He's been everywhere. He knows all the tricks — photograph your rental car, only book through trusted sources, watch your cybersecurity. He does not make rookie errors.
Last week he paid $75 for a chicken kebab at Istanbul Airport.
He admits it himself, writing in the Sydney Morning Herald: he was tired, he was hungry, and he figured a fast food joint in Turkey wouldn't charge that much. He didn't check the conversion. The lira amount on the menu looked fine. It wasn't fine.
The story is funny. It's also a really good illustration of how tourist pricing actually works on you — not through some elaborate scam, but through the simple gap between what a number looks like and what it actually costs.
You don't need to be naive. You just need to be a bit tired, a bit hungry, and in a country where the currency has a lot of zeros.
This is exactly the problem Bobby Ho exists for
Bobby Ho covers Vietnam and Bali — two of the world's most popular tourist destinations, and two places where that exact same mental gap is waiting for you at every market stall, every warung, every street food cart.
You're in Hội An. A vendor quotes you 350,000 đồng for a silk scarf. Your brain hears "three hundred and fifty thousand" and panics a little — or worse, it sees the number and just goes yeah, sounds fine. But is 350,000 đồng a tourist trap, a fair price, or actually a bargain? Most people don't know. Most people guess.
Bobby Ho tells you in seconds. Not a vague "it depends" — actual market context. What the product typically sells for. What a fair tourist price looks like. Whether you're in the right ballpark before you hand over the cash.
Ben Groundwater checked his bank statement after he ate the kebab. Bobby Ho is the check you do before.
The guard-down moment is the dangerous one
What made Groundwater's mistake so relatable is that it wasn't carelessness — it was a completely human moment. Tired, hungry, standing in front of a menu he didn't want to decode. He just pointed at something and said yes.
That moment happens constantly in tourist markets. It happens when you've been walking for two hours in 35-degree heat in Seminyak. It happens when the seller is friendly and the item is genuinely nice and the haggling feels awkward. It happens when you're having a great time and you just don't want to break the vibe to do mental arithmetic.
Bobby Ho is designed for that exact moment. Quick, low-friction, no arithmetic required. Just ask.
Even seasoned travellers get caught out. The currency is unfamiliar, the numbers are large, and the human brain is really bad at exchange rates under pressure.
Ben Groundwater needed a Bobby Ho. He just didn't have one.