"During the European Chess Championships in Dresden I stayed at the IBIS hotel. The European Chess Union had made the participants an offer: Full board in a single room in the IBIS hotel during 14 nights for 98 euros a night. Payment could not be done directly to the hotel; the national federations had to transfer the money to the bank account of the European Chess Union (ECU). The ECU would then pay IBIS. This is an important point to understand what happened. Many players made use of this arrangement - of the Dutch Chess Federation GM Tiviakov, GM Smeets, GM Werle and myself opted for it.
Lunch and dinner in the hotel were extremely poor. Both in terms of quality and quantity. Our complaints to the waiters did not have any effect. After about seven days I spoke to the cook. He told me he couldn’t change the situation since he had been ordered to prepare meals for the players for a value of five euros. And indeed five euros average seems like a good indication for what we got, although it could also have been less..."
Open letter: GM Erik van den Doel
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