Filenews 9 May 2022 - by Dora Christodoulou
Among the many negatives for the tourist industry of Pafos due to the pandemic, a positive development emerged. Along with the tourists who were the driving force of the economy of the province, the last two years also lost the "tourists of compensation", as well as the "lawyer ambulances", which caused damages of hundreds of thousands of euros to the hotels in the years before the coronavirus.
The "compensation tourism" was a permanent source of unforeseen problems and defamation for the hotel industry of Pafos and Cyprus in general. The vertical decline of the tourist flow from Britain during the two years of the pandemic has at least cleaned the landscape from this practice, hotel industry officials point out, estimating that in the post-coronavirus era such practices will no longer have space and the ability to emerge.
Speaking to "F", the member of PASYXE, Marios Vassiliou, pointed out that there were thousands of British tourists who returned to their country after their holidays in Cyprus or other destinations and immediately resorted, with the encouragement and advice of sophisticated agents, to claims against the hotels where they were vacationing, arguing for problems of a mainly medical nature that they allegedly faced during their stay in Cyprus.
"Around the industry that had been set up to claim compensation," Mr. Vassiliou points out, "there were some people called 'ambulance lawyers', i.e. 'ambulance lawyers', because they guide people to file complaints demanding compensation. And their own remuneration is a function of whether the tourist receives compensation and how much.
Usually tourists invoked, when returning home, a medical problem that cannot be proven, mainly gastrointestinal problems that they claimed to have suffered due to eating at the hotel."
The PASYXE executive points out that in essence the hands of the hoteliers were tied, since almost in their entirety the hotels of Cyprus had been forced in recent years before the pandemic to accept signing contracts with British and other tourist giants for the arrival of tourism. And in these contracts, he stresses, unfortunately there is also a provision that if a customer claims compensation for something he suffered during his vacation, the hotel is immediately obliged to compensate him.
