Rooms for manoeuvre

Date: 17/04/1997

The Netherlands' presidency of the EU is playing havoc with the domestic tourist trade.

Until someone decides where the extra European summit likely to be held on 23 May is to be staged, nobody knows whether to turf out thousands of unlucky holidaymakers who may have inadvertently booked into hotels which will be taken over by ministers and officials.

The first rumour was that if the extra summit went ahead, it would be held in Noordwijk - until the Dutch worked out the cost of buying out all the accommodation already booked in the luxury Huis Ter Duin hotel.

The next hot favourite was Maastricht, which has already played host to two summits and has all the facilities required. It is also not burdened by being a prime seaside resort with its hotels booked up months in advance.

But as Entre Nous was heading for the printers, the odds were rising that the event might take place in The Hague.

Meanwhile, media operators who flood summits with teams of camera crews and pundits are taking no chances: they have provisional block bookings in all three places.

The British authorities, who take over the presidency from the Dutch at the start of next year, have been watching all this with interest and some sympathy - the UK government had been planning to stage an informal meeting in the swish surroundings of the Gleneagles Hotel ... until they discovered that the bill for clearing pre-booked rooms and keeping the golf courses empty for one day was being put at 210,000 ecu.