Too many hotels do not serve the guests

Two new hotels closed in the past weeks in Erbil. Perhaps that does not seem very big news, but it is the outcome of an interesting trend. A trend that has nothing to do with business plans and market research, only with spending money and the wish to get rich fast.

When I settled in Iraqi Kurdistan in 2008, there were perhaps a dozen hotels in the capital Erbil and a litte less in Sulaymaniya and Duhok. These were not enough to receive all the visitors from the rest of Iraq coming for holidays during the religious Eid festival and the Kurdish new year Nowroz. That was never a problem in the past. When the weather was fine, people would camp in the parks, or private houses would open their doors for the guests.

Since Kurdistan became a state within the Iraqi federation, tourism has been on a magic word. Get tourists in and get rich, was the idea. Rich foreigners would want to come and spend their money, and they need a hotel to stay. And at the same time, foreign businessmen started arriving to work with oil companies and other international companies.

After 2007, the building of new hotels started. Mainly in the 3 star category, but since then also three 5 star hotels have opened in Erbil and recently one in Sulaymaniya. The capital was the first with a Rotana and a Divan Hotel, as most of the foreign businesses and the diplomatic services are based here. Over the years, more than 200 hotels have been built, and in the small town of Ainkawa twelve with more under construction. Some people suggest that most of the new hotels are paid with money earned in illegal trade or other illegal activities. (Foto Rudaw)

The fact that many of the hotels were built by investors and then rented out to someone who wanted to furnish and manage it, is part of the problem. The rents are far too high for the hotels to be able to make profit.

All these hotels offer a total of, so I calculated, some 16.000 beds. That is far more than the market needs. They might fill up during the religious and new year holidays, but otherwise there is never enough guests for all those beds. Businessmen take the top end of the market, or rent an apartment or house that also serves as their office.

Because of the competition, prices went down. If you want to attract guests and compete, that seemed the easiest way. Competing by quality was not an option, as there is not enough well trained staff for all these hotels. But by decreasing the price, it became even harder for hotels to break even and to remain in business. Some managed by renting out rooms as office space, others just cut down the cost and thus cut down on service. Many of the 3 star hotels are so badly managed and offer such lousy services that guests will not return.

At the same time the cost of the electricity went up, with now almost 24 hours a day being covered by 'raisy', government electricity. The government increased the price quite a bit over the past years. In Erbil also labour costs increased as a consequence of the competition, although with Syrian refugees since the summer coming in and begging for jobs the salaries have come down a little again.

Nobody has really profited from the boom in hotel building. Those who thought to get rich, might perhaps if they were lucky have been able to get the first years rent. But the majority of hotel owners are suffering. And after the initial decrease of the price, the guests are no longer profiting either. Who wants the choice between bad and worse, in a system of hotel qualifications that cannot be trusted - because there is no guarantee that the 3 stars that were given at the opening are really still applicable for many of the newer hotels.

The hotel association begged the authorities to put a stop to the building, having predicted the problems already years ago. It is the hotel managers that know the market best, so they could see that apart from those few holidays when Baghdadi's and Basroui's fled to Kurdistan for a few days they would never be able to fill all those beds. Yet another problem is, that those guests mostly look for the cheapest accommodation, so their presence does only affect part of the many hotels.

But the authorities did not act, probably thinking that in this new capitalist system the market should do the work. Probably knowing that some of the hotels would collapse, and thinking this is the risk the investors were taking. Yet if the authorities had taken their role as the regulator seriously, they could have prevented the disaster - because there surely are more closures under way. Regulating the amount of hotels built by matching it to market expectancy would have made all the difference to the investors who are now losing, the managers who try to keep hotels running on a shoe string and staff that is sacked because of lack of income.

Of bags of blood and health care tourism

'My mother was finally operated on in Iran', says my young Kurdish friend. 'And there were a lot of other Kurds in the same hospital for treatment'.

I need to return in this entry to the bad healthcare in Iraqi Kurdistan, as I have some new stories to share and some new insights. The mother of the friend I just mentioned had planned to have the operation done in Erbil. But when she arrived for the occasion, she was sent away because she did not bring the blood needed for the transfusion. Yet when she made the arrangements a short time before, the surgeon had said no blood was needed.

The family lost trust in the clinic and took the patient to Iran, where health care is better and she was operated on successfully. I am even told that the care is cheaper there. So it is not so strange that, even though Iran is suffering under a strict embargo, many Iraqi Kurds go there for medical treatment.

The issue of the blood is also an interesting one. The mother of another friend needed an urgent heart operation last week. Before she could be admitted, the family had to provide the clinic with five bags of blood of the right blood group. It took some organizing, but the family members donated the blood that was then used in the operation.

For westerners, this is a strange practice. We have blood banks, where blood is donated by volunteers and carefully screened for diseases. The blood is almost a hundred percent safe. What happens to this blood family members of the patients donate - is it screened as carefully? Is there enough time for that, if the operation, as in this case, is an urgent one?

There is another side to this story. The woman went to the local hospital with complaints a few weeks earlier. As she arrived there before the morning shift started, she was put on medication. Even though her arteries needed to be catheterized, she was refused the treatment because of the time of arrival. That time ruled out anything but a treatment with oral medication, after which she spent over a week at home with daily recurring small heart attacks until the family decided to take her to a clinic out of town to get the operation done.

Another recent story. A pregnant doctor from the West went for a check up on the baby and had an echo-cardiogram. In a waiting room full of patients, the secretary asked her when was the last day of her period, and had she ever miscarried. The whole room was listening, and so it also heard the girl before her answer that she had a miscarriage the day before. Private information, that is involuntarily shared with a group of people who can do with it what ever they like - which will be mainly gossiping.

When the pregnant doctor was led into the room for the echo, she found there were two other women already there. The doctor was unkind and impolite, and told her to keep her head still when she tried to steal a look at the monitor. Only when she told him she was a medical doctor herself, his behaviour changed. And while the others were sent away with the gel for the echo still on their stomachs, she was handed a Kleenex.

Now, after all these stories, I want to share with you a reaction that reached me about an earlier entry where I looked for the reasons behind the bad health care in Iraq, and put the blame partly with the doctors and partly with the system.

I  used to be a doctor in Iraq, I worked as an intern for almost 2 years but then had to flee the country and I live in the Netherlands now as an asylum seeker with a 5-years permit.
I completely agree with you about how bad the health system is, but I felt really offended when you blamed the doctors only and pictured the Iraqi doctor as a butcher who slays the patients for money with no mercy at all... 

Iraq is full of corruptions and doctors are humans and there is always a bad human and a good human, but like everything else in Iraq the bad one is in the power position. I met doctors (specialists) forced to work in a hospital (or that is what it should be) in a village 7 days a week living in a (sorry) dumpster called the doctor resident and getting humiliated every day if not by the patients, by the Department of Health.

Well you can't expect a human feeling betrayed, feeling he worked so hard his whole life just to be humiliated every day to give all he can and to keep updating himself. I would love if you would investigate - as a journalist - the life of a doctor in Iraq; a junior doctor and write an article about it. Only then you'll know what is going wrong in the health system of Iraq...

I understand what the doctor is saying, but still I do not agree with him. It can be very good for young doctors to get their first working experience in a local clinic. This is where they will have to learn, because at the Iraqi universities they hardly learned anything about diagnostics or treatment in a real situation. It might be hard not to be respected, but I am afraid when the young doctors are older, they do the same to the younger ones again. It is the system that needs to be changed. And that starts with not only allowing those with top grades to become doctors, but also those that show the necessary passion for the job.

Passionate doctors will want the best for their patients. And for that reason, they are polite, gentle and caring - not only when they find they are treating a colleague. They want to find more information about illnesses and new treatment, because they want their patients to recuperate. They want to improve themselves for the improvement of their patients.

I hope Iraq still has doctors like this, tucked away somewhere. But I doubt it, because of the many stories that I hear. It is high time for the medical practice and the authorities to sit down together, discuss and find ways to improve the situation. We do not want to continue the medical tourism to Iran, Turkey and even India. People who are ill, are entitled to be cared for as good as possible. With their family members at their bedside, and not in a strange country of which they hardly speak the language.

Tourists and the Other Iraq

The camera's click. Dutch tourists line up to preserve the image of the Kurdish landscape for when they are back home. The bus is waiting to take them to the next stop, elsewhere in Iraqi Kurdistan.

After having organised two trips for small tourist groups from the Netherlands, I decided to guide the third tour myself, to see what the guests like and what is needed. It was an interesting adventure. Not only because I got to know a group of nine people quite well in seven days, and because I found the job of a tour leader is not an easy one, but also because it showed me my new country through the eyes of strangers.

When you read the guides the Kurdistan Ministry of Tourism prints, there must be lot of locations in Kurdistan that are interesting for tourists.But when you visit them, this is not really true. Tourists are in different categories. People getting away from the heat in the south have different interests then Westerners who come to discover a new, relatively unspoiled country.

So which subjects were discussed a lot in the group I showed around? The weather - because this September start is still a hot one. The sights - the many different mountains and their colours, the waterfalls and the nature. The bad shape of monuments. The lack of restaurants and hotels on the right spots. The impressive past that is still to be seen. One of my guests told me she had a nightmare after visiting the Red Prison in Sulaymaniya, as the former jail of Saddam's security service has been kept as it was, to give people a good idea of the suffering that went on there.

The bad shape of monuments is a problem the Kurdish authorities have to address. I was shocked on my preparation trip, to find the old gate at Amedi neglected and full of junk. How can you walk down over the broken stones, how can you expect tourists to see through the junk? Only historians who are interested in the Assyrian motives of the gate might do that. But the tourist group I had decided that Amedi was not really as interesting as I had promised. Mister Mayor, can you please do something about this...?

For the same reason I skipped part of the program. Why go to Qaskapan if the walk to the Kings Grave ends at the bottom of a rock that is hard to conquer for most people? Only because the authorities removed the wooden steps to prevent unmarried couples from having a good time in the cave?

And then the lack of restaurants and hotels at the right places. Erbil, Sulaymaniya and Duhok are so crowded with hotels that the owners can hardly survive the competition. Yet were are they in the countryside of Sulav and Amedi? And where is the little restaurant at the lake of Dukan or at Darbandigan? Tourists want to sit and watch with a coffee, tea, juice or even a meal. And the hotel at the Dukan Lake is so difficult to find it feels like a treasure hunt to go there.

Kurdistan wants more tourists. In both Sulaymaniya, Erbil and Duhok big family parks with Ferris wheels and other games are being built. Fun for the family. But that is not what tourists from the West expect to find. Of course, when the cable cars in Sulaymaniya go up to Azmar, that will be an attraction for them too. But they mainly want to discover the history of the country, and the feel of it. They want to enjoy the sights in a comfortable way. This is not about selling alcohol or opening nightclubs. This about realising that different tourists need different attractions.

The bowling halls, the skating rings, the cinema's - they may attract the visitors from inside Iraq, and perhaps also in the future from the region. But to attract visitors that also spend money, different attractions are needed. Historical sites needs to be kept and to be easily accessible. Places of beauty should also provide some possibility to stay and enjoy the sight. That could be a chaixana - tea house - but even a couple of benches are a good option.


The rocks that Kurdish artist Ismail Khayat repainted recently on the road between Koya and Erbil - his peace monument from the brother war - does deserve some benches. And it deserves some respect as well. It is unbearable that in election time the monument is filled with graffiti. The waterfall of Ahmadawa badly needs to be cleaned from plastic bottles and cans - and the be kept clean. Historical sights need sign posts. And another issue: guards at the checkpoints should stop checking the passports of the visitors, as if they are criminals or terrorists. They are your guests, they do not want to be hassled, they are on holiday, want to relax and only be treated as honoured guests.

And do you realise that Kurdistan has hardly any souvenirs, apart from the little painted pebbles Ismail Khayat is offering, or souvenir shops, apart from the shop of the Carpet Museum at the Erbil Citadel?

Of course, when the tourists come, they enjoy the famous Kurdish hospitality. They admire the sights, they love the mountains. But one or two of these groups are not enough to get the message across that Kurdistan is 'the other Iraq'. If just a few changes are made, and if a few people in the right places are aware of the economical and political impact of happy tourists going home with the right stories, then Kurdistan well really profit.