$6,000 Dinner Leads Tourism Officials to Keep Tabs on Industry

‘You may be stopped in the city with exciting and attractive offers to visit a particular restaurant or bar. We cannot tell you not to go there, but your close friends would certainly discourage you.’

-- The Budapest Guide, official publication of the Budapest Tourism Office

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The summer tourist season here got off to a sensational start. Two Danish visitors, escorted by a pair of Hungarian women, were charged $6,000 for dinner at a modest downtown restaurant. About half of the charges, according to the bill, went for a round of drinks for the musicians.

The Dreher Halaszcsarda (Fisherman’s Inn) has since been chained and padlocked shut--city authorities ordered the establishment closed for 90 days. But the nearby Vaci utca, or pedestrian district, remains packed with pretty women offering similarly enticing dining suggestions.

And the sensation continues. In a recent incident, an unsuspecting German tourist was charged $300 when he treated two such women--known in local parlance as “consumer girls”--to a cocktail in the popular District V tourist area. Unlike his Danish counterparts, however, the cheated German had somewhere to turn: the 24-hour tourist complaints office of the Budapest police.

“He had to pay in German marks because he didn’t have that much Hungarian money,” said Reka Hanzely, among 150 college students hired this summer as police interpreters. “I helped him write up a report, and the police are looking into closing the restaurant now.”

The multilingual complaints office is one of several changes underway in Budapest and across Hungary as tourism officials launch a high-profile effort to salvage the country’s reputation following a summer of embarrassing rip-off revelations.

Tourism is big business in Hungary, and officials desperately want to prevent the overcharging scams from scaring off travelers. About 40 million visitors spent $2.2 billion in Hungary last year; tourism officials project expenditures will double in the next five years. Even under communism, Hungary was the favorite Eastern Bloc destination among Western travelers.

“Hungary has always been one of the best values for the money in Europe,” said Gyorgy Szekely, general director for tourism at the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Tourism. “When the problems started this summer, we realized we had to move right away to stop such developments.”

The latest Budapest city guide warns visitors to avoid shady establishments. Hundreds of students in “Tourist Police” T-shirts have been dispatched to the country’s hottest tourist spots.

And some honest restaurateurs--also feeling the financial pinch of wary tourists--have launched a good-eateries public relations campaign. Even the U.S. Embassy has become involved, issuing a list of clip joints and warning American visitors that diners have been beaten up for refusing to pay excessive bills.

“Under no circumstances should a citizen of the United States order food or beverage services without first verifying the cost,” the embassy instructed.

In the most far-reaching move, proposed consumer protection legislation, to be debated by the Hungarian parliament this fall, would allow authorities to impose unlimited fines on clip joints--the current maximum is about $150--and revoke licenses without a court order.

A separate proposal would ban prostitution, which is a largely tolerated misdemeanor in Hungary, in popular tourist places, presumably clearing the streets of most “consumer girls” as well.

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“The existing regulations are unfortunately geared toward petty crimes, not the organized criminal activity now entering the scene,” Szekely said. “It seems some criminal organizations were and are trying to penetrate the restaurant industry.”

Since the widely publicized Danish episode, authorities have closed 17 restaurants and nightclubs in District V for consumer fraud and nine others have been targeted for prosecution this month; until new legislation is approved, however, the establishments will be free to reopen after 90 days. “It is an ongoing process,” said a spokeswoman for the Budapest Consumer Protection Office.