Our love affair with tourism is over, we must move on

WEDNESDAY, DEC. 21: Bermudians have walked away from tourism.

But some of us, politicians in general and Tourism Ministers in particular, acting like a crazed lover, are still stalking tourism.

A variety of social, demographic, and technological changes have forever altered Bermuda’s tourism product and Bermudian relationships with tourists and tourism.

In rough order of importance, here are six facts describing the critical changes.

1. Bermuda’s middle class

 Increasing prosperity amongst Bermudians working in and supporting Bermuda’s tourist industry meant that income demands were always rising. Supported by a powerful union, Bermudian hotel workers were able to wrest higher and higher wages and benefits from all the establishments that underpinned Bermuda’s tourist industry.

However, while enriching the workers and helping to create Bermuda’s new and now sizeable middle class, this process also reduced the profitability of all hotel properties and tourism-related services and establishments.

2. Tourism’s 1947 re-start

A second, concealed, change was that Bermuda’s 1947 re-start of its war-interrupted (WWll 1939-1945) tourism industry meant that 40 years later, by 1987, the band of Bermudian workers who helped create and who staffed tourism’s 1947 re-start were aging-out, retiring, dying, or leaving the industry for other, easier, end-of-career work.

3. Generational shift

 In a human evolution that links to the second change, these thousands of Bermudian hotel and infrastructure support workers — both black and white — who were such gracious smiling hosts and who participated in the 1947 re-start, were not grooming their progeny to follow their steps and enter Bermuda’s hospitality industry.

Instead, their progeny were being educated and encouraged to be lawyers, accountants, teachers, and other professionals. There was, therefore, an entirely predictable generational shift amongst Bermudians. That shift was away from and out of Bermuda’s tourist industry.

4. Desegregation

In the overall creation and growth of Bermuda’s tourism, between the Bermuda Development Company (Tucker’s Town and Furness Withy operation) 1920 kick-off and 1960, there was a clear, formal, and discriminatory racial ban on black Bermudian employment and advancement within the tourist industry.

Beginning in 1960, Bermuda’s formal racial discrimination barriers began coming down. From 1960 on, black Bermudians had wider opportunities.

Those who could, moved into the previously closed off private and government sectors that had opened up. Some, obviously, would have come from the tourist industry.

So 1960 saw the beginnings of a racial exodus as black Bermudians walked away from the tourist industry to take advantage of their new and wider opportunities.

5. Jet travel

Boeing’s 600mph 707 jet plane introduced a new era of global travel by cutting travel time in half making everywhere twice as close. New York to London once needed 14 hours and one stopover whereas the Boeing 707 cut that to a seven hour direct flight.

Also, flight costs came down.

Although Bermuda’s selling-point two-and-half hour flight time from NYC was cut to just 90 minutes, Bermuda was now competing directly with Bahamas and Jamaica and other destinations which were now just two or three hours away. Bermuda lost a significant time and ease differential.

6. Globalized tourism

Bermuda’s Hoteliers had to fight hard to maintain — indeed lower — their basic operating costs as compared to their new and expanding range of global competitors. One of these operating costs was labour.

National manpower flows indicate that the process of supplanting Bermudian labour with foreign labour began in the 1980s.

Driven by brutal global business competition, that foreign labour also came cheaper. This replacement of Bermudian labour coincided with the generational shift and racial exodus of Bermudians.

In 2011, Bermudians have walked away from the kind of tourism Bermudians once knew and had. Across the board and despite all entreaties, Bermudians will not go back to tourism in substantive numbers.

In 2011, the economics of tourism in Bermuda dictate that the industry must be staffed by lowest cost — that means foreign  labour.

In 2011, Bermuda’s primary national economic driver is financial services. Financial services requires the infrastructure and ambience created by tourism. So Bermuda’s tourism industry cannot disappear. However, Bermudians and Tourism Ministers must accept that tourism will never again be as it was in tourism’s long past heyday.

Vivid memories of warm lips and hot embraces can linger long after a lover has left, but they are just memories.

Bermudians and Ministers must stop hanging on to their sweet memories of tourism’s past and must build a new style of tourism.