Linkages and Leakages: the Planning Factor
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LINKAGES AND LEAKAGES: THE PLANNING FACTOR CHAPTER 2 odp;nate. They must also provide a suitable infrastructure for demanding toutists and shape a financial climate attractive m wetseas investors. places unable to guarantee such conditions atttact few tourists. Keeping the Peace Linkages and Leakages: To&U must be protected from political upheaval, strikes, ot coups. At d,e finr whiff of unrest, both mur operaton and governments go OII red The Planning Factor &rt. When a few smnes were thrown at the St Kim parliament building &I an unresolved general election in 1993 and a brief state of emergency was announced, cruise ships cancelled instantly. When, in the same year, protesting banana fanners in St Lucia blocked the main road Keeping the flights full, the hotel lobbies buzzing, the beaches lined witl from Hewanorra airport and tourists had m be airlifted m their hotels, occupied sunbeds, the duty-free complexes crammed with eager shop the government warned of the negative effect on tourism and pm- pen depends m a large extent O” the endeavour of local governments Like unseen, overworked stage managers who have to make sure every. nounced that tourists must not be inconvenienced by local difiiculties. thing is in place for the showbiz spectacular, the public secmt of thf Guided by tax operators, travel agents and governments, tourists react feverishly m bad news caused by any sort of instability, real ot imagined. Caribbean dances attendance on its audiences for fear the reviews will b< poor and that the entrepreneurs - airlines, mu operators, hotel chains The result is that they stay away; there is, after all, always another beach cruise lines - will next year take the show elsewhere. in another place. The sort of une.xpected and brief flurties of political difficulty The burden 0x1 Caribbean governments to organize their toutis uperienced by St Kite and St Lucia caused short-tetm disruption and industries largely on other people’s tams was forcefully described bl short-term loss. More damaging m the region’s tourist industries, how- Herbert Hi&x, a leading public relations figure in the cruise-shi1 ever, is long-term disaffection. This happens either as a result of the dis- business who made sane innovative suggestions about the region’: tourism problems in the early 1970s. He wmte later: integration of civil society, as in Haiti, ot because of an externally imposed blockade, as in Cuba. Tourism in Haiti, for example, has been tiaually non-existent since the mid-1980s. First came the tunmur that Aids originated in Haid; then the fall of the Duvalier dictatorship in 1986, a long pet&d of unrest, the election of President Jean-Bertrand Adstide in 1990, the military coup wlch forced him into exile and subsequent economic sanctions. Those events proved mire unattractive to tourists than had the years of the Duvaliets’ violent Tonton Macoutc excesses. Then, Ametican toutists continued m visit the country, albeit in sheltered enclaves, far from the ugly repression in the slums. When the cruise ships had docked at Port- au-Prince, the squalor had been tw distressing for the tourists. Some members of the Caribbean’s tourist industry would IIOW atgw Until the return of President Aristide in 1994, Haiti’s Office of with Hillet’s 20.year-old analysis; others might still agree with it.; National Tourism had a towism director, six other employees with Whatever the perception, ministers of tourism can rarely afford to le nothing m do and no brochures. Branch offices in Miami, New York, their eye off the ball of customer satisfaction. Montreal and Paris had shut their doors, while hotels had closed (ot First among the priorities, and predicating all tourist activity in the claimed a less than 5 pet cent occupancy rate) and art and craft vendon Caribbean, is the safety and comfort of the visitor. These are costl! went out of business. In fact, the whole edifice of tourism was no more. responslb~tles. Host governments must create a stable political environ In cwmast, it was not civil unrest which caused Amelicans m stay merit, preferably sympathetic to the countries from which the tourist away from Cuba but ideological hostility and a trade embargo virtually 28 29 L INKAGES AND LEAKA GES: THE PLANNING F ACTOR banning US citizens from rravelIing there. For similar reasons, Americans Such ‘ec+&l bubbles’ contain airports, roads, water supply, also eschewed Grenada during Maurice Bishop’s left-wing Peop sewerage disposal, electricity and telephones. These facilities make the Revolutionary Government (PRG) between 1979 and 1983. Tou tourists’ journey not just possible, but convenient and smooth. Police, arrivals to Grenada dropped by 25 per cent overall, while the US share immigration and customs services, currency and licensing controls must the market decreased by 77 per cent between 1978 and 1982. while &o be upgraded and expanded. All these projects are expensive. Funded some argued that the decline was due more to economic factors than pady by aid but also by e.xpensive borrowing, they must aII be paid for political ones, the pro-tourism PRG claimed that travel agencies in the in the end by local people through some sort of taxation. USA put out hostiIe information about the left-wing regime. Certainly. Leaden of the tourist industry, both foreign and regional, lobby the American press followed its own government’s anti-PRG line. governments to improve the infrastructure. In St Maarten, for instance, Visitors to Jamaica also declined during Prime Minister Michael one of the key ‘mass tourism’ destinations, long-term government neg- Manley’s first term of office in the 1970s. Hostile reports about Manley’s lect has boomeranged on to the hoteliers, and has been one of the causes semi-socialist experiments fell foul of US public opinion and the toudsh of low hotel occupancy rates. ‘We think all the infiistructural needs stayed away. As Jamaica’s Daily Gleaner put it in 1976: ‘as naturally as should be upgraded to help us with the quality of the product,’ says night follows day, American investments for Jamaica dry up; the Henk Koek, manager of the long-established Holland House Hotel, on American press burn us at the stake; our tourist industry, which is almost the seafront of St Marten’s capital, Pbilipsburg. totally sustained by the American market, begins to die on its feet, and Of all in&structural needs, an international airport, which can handle we find that the world has suddenly become a much more dif?icuIt place wide-bodied jets from North America and Europe and process to make our way in’.’ jumbo-loads of arrivals, is a priority. The lack of a major airport is one Natural as welI as political instability also aifects consumer confidence. (although not the only) reason why islands such as St Vincent, The Caribbean suffers from hurricanes, and, less frequently, from Montserrat and Dominica have fewer tourists than neighboudng islands earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. In 1988, for instance, Hurricane such as Grenada or Antigua. Gilbert blew its way through Jamaica just before the start of the tourist Large-scale investment in the 1960s and 1970s went into building season, destroying buildings and infrastructure, with the result that, airports for tourism. Funds mostly came from foreign governments and tourists stayed away and tourism receipts for that year dropped by nearly agencies, but the enormous sums of money needed to maintain them one-third. In some cases, a whole season’s income from tourism has been must be found by Caribbean governments. The costs are heavy; lost in the wake of disasten; and even when stricken areas get back on Grenada’s international airport, for example, was built by the Cubans their feet, it takes time for the international press and the travel trade to for USBhh million and completed by the Americans for US$l9 million. note a recovery. In the wake of Hurricanes Luis and Marilyn in But by 1995, it was receiving an average of only three international ~ September 1995, it was noticeable that the Caribbean Tourism flights a day, including chatters. A manager for Martinique’s inter- Organization wasted no time in promising that 50 per cent of the national airport has estimated that the arrival ofat least sixjumbo jets per region’s hotels would be open by the December of that year. day or their equivalent are needed to pay for the high running costs. ‘.-- Airport extensions, anrlapating tourism expansion, continued ‘. Roads to Development throughout the early 1990s. Massive airport workings in Martinique If the political dimate registers calm and the barometer shows no change, Were undertaken to handle two million passengers a year by 2000, while the next task of governments is to provide a modern and reliable I” the Dominican Republic the newly e.upanded Gregorio Luper611*~- infrastructure. Investors require that the groundwork is prepared for international Airport opened on the no& coast at a cost of USS20 them. However impoverished the living conditions of the local pop&- million. Funded by the government and some foreign sou~ccs, the tion, investon need ‘modern’, Western-style amenities to attract aIrport is designed to handle 1,800 passengers per hour and six planes tourists. As Erik Cohen wrote in 1978, ‘a tourist infrastmcture sunultaneously. It has a new taxiway, control tower, two-level passenger facilities based on Western standards has to be created even in the poorest tetin.d, restaurants, shops, car park, and, as the Santa Domingo News host countries. This tourist infrastructure provides the mass tourist with announced: ‘It is forecasted that the new extensions wiIl be able to cope the “ecological bubble” of his accustomed environment.” efficiently with the anticipated increase in passengers until the year 30 31 LINKAGES nio LEAKAGES: THE PLANNING FKTOR 2005.” The new airport was opened in 1994 by President Balaguer of Tourism to support the work of the Jamaica Tourist Board while the eve of the country’s general election as a carefully orchestra US$15.7 don went on tourism-related projects such as sewerage political event.