Spanish tourism investors meeting with President Leonel Fernandez highlighted the need to improve the area surrounding hotels. Bienvenido Alvarez-Vega, director of Hoy newspaper, reports that the Spanish investors who met President Leonel Fernandez, Tourism Minister Felix Jimenez and Technical Secretary of the Presidency Temistocles Montas in Spain pressed the point home. Alvarez-Vega points out that the three could do something about the problem given the influence tourism has on all Dominican industries as a major buyer of goods and services locally. He laments that this kind of complaint exists, and that it has to be made to the President when he travels abroad. Not because it is wrong that the Spaniards make these comments, but rather because the conditions around the hotels should be hygienic, with good services and security and that that there should not be any cause for complaint, because we all know that tourism is the most important activity in the DR.
Alvarez-Vega points out that the governments have felt few commitments to the tourism areas and stresses that we need not forget that tourism is the sector best positioned to bring foreign investments and policies should be designed to this end.
Spanish investment has dominated in the Punta Cana area. Ernesto Veloz, president of the Association of the East, has discussed on several occasions the negative effects of unplanned and rapid construction in the Punta Cana area, such as the attracting of Haitian laborers that have led to the creation of improvised slum towns for the Haitian workers that today make up half of the resident population in the resort area.