It's a 'chun choi' world out there

I would like to put in the records here my bad experiences with touts at Medan airport. It left me with a big sense of insecurities as my group and I were misled, cheated and harassed from the point we walked out of the airport. What was supposed to be a fun-filled trip turned out to be rather stressful and affected our stay in Medan. My advise to everyone who travels there, especially after exiting the airport, please please be very careful who you pick as taxi driver. There are many opportunistic bad apples stationed at the airport in the guise of taxi driver but with the sole intention of cheating unsuspecting tourists. Always note their taxi permit number and their taxi registration number so that you can try reporting any bad event to the Tourism authority, but then again, I doubt they can do anything much. So, it's still better to avoid falling into the trap of one of these.
We got our taxi driver, agreed on the rate and he took us to the city centre. However, upon arriving at our hotel, he insisted on additional fee. We paid him to avoid arguments and then and there decided we will not be using his services anymore for the rest of our trip. However, he argued that our asking him about his rate for trip to Lake Toba consitute an 'agreement' or 'contract' with him. Therefore, when we decided to cancel him, he harassed us by going to our hotel rooms and knocking on our doors. He even brought along a friend to psychologically threaten us. When we didn't respond to his continuous pounding on the room door, he went downstairs and waited for us at the breakfast area. The hotel securities personnel came to our rescue but even with the presence of the security personnel, the taxi driver refused to accept the changes and demanded a cancellation fee. We didn't want to pay because there was no agreement in the first place.
We must thank the hotel securities personnel and the management for providing us with the safe route out of the hotel without him coming near us. At that moment, the 4 of us felt threatened. And since we were in a foreign country, we were really worried because we didn't know if he had contacts with other bad hats out there.
We must also thank Cik Irma for doing all the necessary arrangement for us, inlcuding calling the agents to cancel and re-arrange our itinerary and putting us in touch with a reliable person in the form of Jenson Sinaga to help us plan our next half of the trip. Jenson Sinaga proved to be a really reliable person. He even got a few of his friends to help escort us to the agency to make the changes. And he also provided us with a very good and reliable driver, Ronnie to take us on our trip to Lake Toba. This part of the trip will be posted at this blog in due time.
What I really want to say to those intending to travel to Medan, please look out for unscrupulous touts at the airport. If possible, make prior arrangement for people to pick you up at the airport. Do not be like us in that we only looked for transport arrangement upon arriving. Doing prior research will definitely help to avoid such unfortunate situation, which almost destroyed our trip.