The Ministry of Tourism is struggling to pass off the fact that pictures of other travel destinations have been used in Bermuda's latest advertising campaign as no big deal.

Minister Renee Webb and other officials are wrong. It is a big deal because it is deceptive; the average reader of the advertisements will assume that the pictures are of Bermuda.

It is true, as one-time Director of Tourism Andrew Vladimir has pointed out in a letter to the Editor, that stock pictures are used in advertising all the time. They are for generic sorts of advertising like an image of Main Street, a plane taking off or of cows in a field.

But there is a line between that and destination advertising where the advertisers are trying to convince customers to travel to a particular place. The customer must believe that what they see in the photographs is what they will get when they arrive in the place. If that's not the case, then they might as go to Hawaii instead.

To add insult to injury, what makes this worse is that this campaign is trying to convince customers that Bermuda is a genteel, up-market destination; not the kind of place that deceives it customers. Instead, it has now been revealed that Bermuda is using pictures taken elsewhere and that the pictures were subsequently altered.

There are two other reasons to be concerned about this. One is that Bermuda is too beautiful - a photographers' paradise - to need to use other pictures of other places.

Secondly, this was just stupid. It is extremely worrying that no one in either the Department of Tourism or in its advertising agency, Arnold Worldwide, ever considered how easy it would be for someone to realise that the pictures were taken somewhere else.

While Graeme Outerbridge deserves credit for uncovering this deception, it is reasonable to believe that he did not have to look very hard. Now Bermuda is the victim of the worst kind of publicity for no good reason at all.

Under the late David Allen, the Ministry of Tourism lost virtually every experienced senior manager it had and while the current team is no doubt enthusiastic and hard-working, it begs the question of whether a more experienced hand would have caught this and stopped it.

Instead of trying to defend the ads, the Department should control the damage to restore Bermuda's reputation by withdrawing the pictures immediately and replacing them with pictures that were actually taken in Bermuda.