Isfahan Hotel Owners’ Association has denied claims that the city’s hotels are fully booked until March 2016.
Emphasizing the adverse impact of spreading false news in the tourism industry, Mehdi Narimani, the head of the association, urged Iran’s Cultural Heritage, Handicrafts and Tourism Organization to deal with the problem.
Last week, Ebrahim Pourfaraj, head of Iranian Tour Operators’ Association, said all four- and five-star hotels in the Iranian metropolises of Isfahan, Yazd, Shiraz, Ahvaz and Tehran are fully booked until the end of the current Iranian year (March 19, 2016).
“People who have no reliable data on whether a hotel is fully booked should not allow themselves to come up with such wild claims,” Narimani said.
He said December, January and February are collectively considered the off-season, meaning Iran does not receive a lot of foreign tourists during this period.
“People have to start considering the consequences of what they say. False statements can have dire ramifications,” Narimani said, adding that ICHHTO should form a committee tasked with confronting those who make inaccurate statements.
The hotelier said claiming that hotels are fully booked will not only interfere with effective planning, but would also cause problems between hotel owners and the Iranian National Tax Administration.
Narimani said since ICHHTO has the most up-to-date statistics regarding tourism, it is better to leave statistical reports to it.
This is not the first time Narimani has rejected claims of Isfahan’s hotels being fully booked. In October 2014, he said the city’s lodging facilities were at 80% capacity.
