into liquidation, which left travellers on the island without a flight home. 7000 customers failed to get a refund for their tickets. In August 2005, Brigitte Bardot wrote to the head of Réunion to complain about the "dogs as shark bait" scandal, which had caused a media storm. Also, the Chikungunya epidemic, which started at the end of 2005, reached a peak in January 2006. These all dissuaded people from visiting the island and receipts from tourism fell by 27% and employment declined in the hotel industry. The CTR blamed the drop in tourism on the epidemic, in addition to the negative image that the island had suffered in the media.<ref name="14juin06">JIR, Wednesday 14 June 2006, « L'île à sensations victime de ses images négatives »</ref> There had also been media exaggeration of the risk of shark attacks around the island, and of the risk of links to the Asian SARS outbreak. Believing the crisis to be cyclical, the CTR relaunched an information campaign, while the local tourism employers turned to the mainland for support. Three months later, barely 3 million of the expected 60 million had reached their intended recipients. Large groups with international stature, such as Bourbon and Accor, were excluded from state support due to European regulations. Small, local, businesses struggled to compile the right documentation. The Villepin government celebrated it as 4.5 million to relaunch tourism. A plan to relaunch Réunion as a destination was announced in September 2005. This campaign was launched from the City Hall steps in Paris, at the invitation of the mayor, Bertrand Delanoë. They hoped this would relaunch the destination with the mainlanders and Réunion expatriates, and seduce foreign tourists with the Creole village punch and samosas. The campaign was publicised by the written media, television and the internet. The CTR were assigned a budget of 800,000 Euros to publicise Réunion better in Germany, Belgium and Switzerland. At the same time, the Prime Minister told the agency Odit France to compile a report analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of tourism in Réunion. At the end of 2006, the Journal de l'île'' published an article claiming that the problems being discussed were in fact masking the underlying structural problems. Improvements since 2014 onwards In 2014, 405,700 foreign tourists visited the island. Tourists coming from metropolitan France (Europe) were 78% of the total. That same year, the number of tourists from the rest