Tenerife dentists complain about Irish people booking appointments to avoid travel fines

The dentists have claimed that people have asked for a confirmation email and then failed to show up for their bookings

Irish people travelling to Tenerife on holidays have been booking appointments with dentists and then failing to show up, according to dentists on the island. A new trend in recent weeks has seen Irish people contacting dentists on the Spanish island seeking appointments and asking for a confirmation email of their booking. Speaking on RTÉ Radio 1, Roberta Beccaris from Clínica Dental in Tenerife said the people are not showing up to the bookings and are instead using it as an excuse for a holiday. "What has been happening the last few weeks is we've been receiving a lot of emails and phone calls from Ireland and all these patients were requesting an email that certified that they had an appointment at our practice," she said. "This was very unusual because before they were just calling as we were used to having people who come from abroad - Irish or from the UK - and they never ask for an email of the confirmation and now they started to ask for it." It's understood the people were using the confirmation email as a tool to avoid fines for unnecessary travel to and from Ireland. Over the past two weeks, Beccaris said they'd received an unusually high number of calls and emails from young Irish people, which is unusual in itself as most of their customers from Ireland would tend to be older. "I would see at least five, six and even seven emails from young Irish people, when normally they are older, but now they are young and they clearly just want a holiday," Beccaris said. She said the practice is now aware of the trend, but spoke of frustration due to appointments being taken away from genuine customers. "We were quite suspicious about it and then what happened, these patients were not turning up," Beccaris said. "We were waiting for them and they are not coming to the practice."