Two Pints Of Lager And A Three Piece Suit

Yet more from the brave new world of the reformed tourism law. It is not just a law for the hotels, insists the brave new(ish) tourism minister. It is a law that will also help the "complementary offer", the bars, the restaurants, the clubs, the shops. And how might it help exactly? Carlos Delgado has a scheme whereby bars, for example, would be able to sell clothing. What the shops make of the idea, who knows, but one would doubt that they will be over enamoured of it. What will the shops be able to do? Sell beer on draught?

This proposal seems to imply that various businesses which form the complementary offer will be able to provide each other's services and products. It would need to be fleshed out and made clearer, but, as examples, a restaurant, one presumes, might be able to have a deli counter or a bar might be able to flog more clothing than the bar-promotional T-shirts that they currently do.

One reason, indeed the main reason it would seem, for this proposal is to give the complementary offer a means of combatting a loss of business brought about by all-inclusives. In principle, it may have some merit, but isn't there a slight flaw? All-inclusives mean less being spent outside the hotel. Why should a bar go to the trouble and expense of stocking up with shorts and flip-flops, when they probably wouldn't sell them.

A consequence of this might be that the different businesses end up engaging in price wars. Good for the consumer, the consumer that exists, that is, but not necessarily good for individual businesses. More to the point, though, is that the proposal smacks of putting the cart of trying desperately to find a way to compensate for the impact of all-inclusives before the horse of actually doing something about all-inclusives. The problem is, of course, that there is very little that can be done about all-inclusives.

In purely practical terms, would a bar, especially a bar that isn't that big, give up some space that can generate cash through bums on seats in the hope that they might coin in more from flogging clothes or cans of baked beans? The proposal sounds like a sop to the complementary offer that has seen little by way of anything else to emerge from the tourism law reform, and a sop that would be unlikely to achieve much.

Still, you can't blame the government for trying something different, and maybe the proposal might in fact work. If nothing else, it would offer a bar or restaurant the opportunity to diversify if it wished to.

Minister Delgado says that "structural reforms", such as this one, within the tourism sector will help to boost the economy as a whole. Some of the reforms probably will achieve this, but there are structural problems within the sector, of which the growth in all-inclusives is one. All that the government can come up with is to let bars sell clothes and prohibit the taking of food and drink off hotel premises. The latter reform, designed, it is said, to help bars by stopping all-inclusive guests wandering the streets with plastic glasses of lager, will achieve almost nothing, other than to provide the hotels with a massive headache when confronted by uppity tourists who are determined to go walkabout with free Saint Micks in their hands.

If the government really wanted to help bars and so on, why doesn't it do something about all the restrictions and procedures that the bars have been saddled with over the past few years? The proposal does refer to "entertainment", so maybe it is envisaged that there will be some relaxation in respect of music licences or limiters. The government might also look at making gaming legal in bars and at creating the possibility for self-employed workers to actually be able to gain a category of business activity that would enable bars to take them on as bar staff for short periods without all the hassle of entering into contracts and the expense of paying social security. But then, I suppose, there would be a hue and cry about taking away fixed-contract workers.

As much as changing market conditions have made life more difficult for bars, so have all the rules. The government seems content to make life easier for the hotels by changing the rules, so why doesn't it do so for other sectors?


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.