Since nobody else has come forward with background information about those models, I have now conducted a search among my old Matchbox USA magazines and unearthed the articles in which they were originally mentioned. I remembered those articles but did not remember when exactly they had been printed, so without the help of an index the search took me quite a while - sorry I did not find the time for this at an earlier date!
It turns out the models were first introduced to the Matchbox USA members in November 1987 - some five and a half years after their issue date. The scans reproduced here are from the November and December 1987 issues of Matchbox USA:
I cannot be 100% certain about the accuracy of Philip Bowdidge's account of how those models were produced, but I have no reason to doubt him.
If one accepts the story as printed to be true - i.e. that the models were delivered from the factory in England to the French Matchbox subsidiary loose and that the labels were produced in France and applied by French Matchbox employees who subsequently packed the models in single blisterpacks and had them delivered to the hotel chain - , then those models have to be regarded as Code 1 issues: entirely produced by Matchbox including the application of the promotional labels.
Of course this does not nullify the fact that those labels are easy to reproduce and that it is therefore easy to produce fakes of those models. For this reason I still think that it is not a good idea to spend large amounts of money on them, in spite of their undoubted rarity - first because you can hardly ever be sure that you will get a genuine item, and second because you will instigate the production of even more fakes.
