The president of the National Hotel & Restaurant Association and the president of the Tourism Promotion Council (CPT) attributed to merely internal business motives the stir in the British press caused by the British tour operator, Airtours. Airtours announced it would no longer be selling several Dominican properties due to reasons of hygiene at these. Asonahores pointed to the fact that the most important tour operator in the United Kingdom, Thomson continues to sell the Dominican Republic. "While some of the competitors of Thomson, such as Airtours have tried to resolve their problems by spoiling the image of the DR before the British people, Thomson has associated with Dominicans in their quest to improve the local tourism product," said the president of Asonahores, Marino Ginebra. In recent years, Thomson has sent more than 200,000 UK travelers to the DR and sales of Dominican package tours increase every year. One United Kingdom-based contributor to the Dominican Republic One News and Information Service expressed his suspicion of the motives of Airtours when canceling three hotels operated by the Spanish Occidental hotel chain. He said that he was "immediately suspicious of contract/pricing/profit/business issues rather than genuine concerns." He told the story of how "a few years ago my girlfriend and I went to a resort called Salou in Spain. Before we went we had never heard of it and when talking to an English bar owner we were told that about five years before the British press had an anti-Salou week, claiming that the place was riddled with typhoid. Anyway this bloke said that what ACTUALLY happened was that there was a small outbreak of typhus ( not typhoid ) and this gave the tour operators an excuse to get out of thousands of hotel bookings for which they had no customers (this was at the start of the recession in the UK). Hence the bad press was for the tour operators balance sheet not for travellers benefit. One medical doctor, Juan Escarfuller, told the DR One service, "I said it before and I’ll say it again, this is just a trick from the competition with financial interests in other tourists resorts in the Caribbean and Mexico where the sanitary conditions, in my own experience, are worse than yours." He recommended tourists to use only bottled water, don’t eat from street vendors, and when not staying at a 4-5 stars hotel, don’t eat the cold dishes at the buffets. The Dominican tourism spokesmen said that the Dominican Republic participates in the Caribbean Hotel Association programs, supported by the World Health Organization to maintain improved levels of hygiene in local hotels. Furthermore, Asonahores said that 70% of the 28,000 rooms in large hotels have contracts with the English firm Crystal, that specializes in food hygiene control for hotels and restaurants, and implement the food management program known as Health Analysis Crystal Control Points. This program costs Dominican hoteliers over US$2 million a year. The Dominican Republic is the leading tourism destination for European tourists, including the UK travel market. Asonahores said that in the 90s more than five million European tourists principally from Germany, Italy, England, Spain, Belgium, Austria and France have visited the DR. After Europe, the second largest regional market for the DR is North America. From the U.S., some 1.1 million visitors arrived in the past two years, of which 814,000 were from the United States and 280,000 from Canada. As of December 1997, the hotel inventory was 38,250 rooms, of which more than 50% were operated by leading international companies, such as Meli?, Riu, Renaissance (Marriott), Club Mediterranee, Premier, Accor, Fiesta, Allegro, Viva, Intercontinental, Occidental, Iberostar, LTU, among others. In the past 15 years, the hotel inventory has increased 36%, and the number of arrivals has increased 28%. This is way above the average of the World Tourism Organization for the Caribbean and for the world.
