Three more comments for you :
Most of the merchandise that goes into hotels have a racket around it. You have to be able to deal with the person that the hotel, or hotel store deals with. It is kinda like the Mob sometimes.
And secondly, I think it was MrMike that recently said, there is a book of import duties, it belongs to aduana, they read from it, and they don't tell you what they read. So, you simply have to pay what they say they read in their book. DR-Cafta (if it is ever implemented) should help with cleaning up this system, but I'm beginning to think the DR will never get to implementing the regulations that DR-Cafta requires before implementation. I would suggest to consider your business model very carefully. Also, payment terms - with hotels you're going to be hit with 30 day payment terms and receive actual payment in 90 days.
Lastly, tourists in the DR currently are mostly All Inclusive based. They don't really walk around and purchase stuff. I had some statistics from someone a while back that the average tourist used to spend something like 80 bucks to buy stuff over a week long holiday, and this number has decreased to something like 36 bucks.
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