The Secret Tourist

BBC One · TV Week · 28 Jul 2010 · by: BBC

Matt Allwright and his team go undercover in hotels, reveal tourist scams and research potential safety hazards in popular holiday destinations around the world, in BBC One's new consumer holiday series, The Secret Tourist.

In the first episode, Matt sends a British family to an all-inclusive resort in the Dominican Republic to find out if bad reports from some tourists are really true. Kitted out with secret cameras, the family goes undercover to investigate the hotel's facilities. With help from the series' environmental health expert, Dr Lisa Ackerley, the secret tourists make some shocking revelations about the health, hygiene and safety of the resort. These include finding salmonella and E.coli in the food and the Legionella pathogen in the hot water, posing a risk of Legionnaires disease. Matt then visits the resort to put these findings directly to the hotel management.

Reporter Carole Machin investigates holiday doctors on the Spanish island of Tenerife, after reports of some of them over-treating and over-charging tourists. Trying them out for herself, will the healthy undercover reporter be given expensive and unnecessary treatment?

Con artists can strike in any holiday destination. This week, Matt reveals a trick they have been known to pull on unsuspecting tourists – a fake day-trip scam. With Matt's insider tips, travellers will be better prepared to avoid getting conned themselves.

The Secret Tourist team research the holidays from hell, so viewers don't have to.