I have never been to The Maldives. It is one of those holiday destinations that is a brochure-writer's dream. How many meaningless superlatives for islands set amidst turquoise seas with romantic, palm-lined, velvety white beaches can be contained in a brochure? The entire brochure thesaurus can be thrown at descriptions of The Maldives. But you won't find any descriptions about what it must be like if you are a fifteen-year-old girl who has been raped and who finds herself anticipating receiving a hundred lashes for her crime. Crime? How in Allah's name or any other name, can she have committed a crime?
An online petition that urges a tourism boycott of The Maldives has thus far attracted almost two million names. The islands' tourism minister has said that this damage to the tourism industry must stop. There wouldn't be a campaign in Switzerland to damage Swiss chocolate, he has protested bizarrely. No, there probably wouldn't be, but then the Swiss don't as a rule go around lashing fifteen-year-old rape victims.
If the petition succeeds, then good. If it means the collapse of a miserable government with a miserable tourism minister, then also good. Tourists taking a genuine stand against miserable regimes is long overdue. But will they? Or will tourism life just carry on much as normal, a blind eye being turned to inhumanity and turned instead to the grass sunshades dotted along those velvety white beaches where tourists can relax on sturdy wooden sun loungers listening to the gentle lapping of the turquoise sea and the screams of a girl being given a far from gentle thrashing?
Tourism and morality are often mutually exclusive. Defining tourist morality or immorality is a question of the degree of the possible immorality. Is it immoral for a tourist to come to Mallorca, stay in an all-inclusive and as a result primarily fill the coffers of a foreign tour operator? Whether it is or it isn't, no one is getting hurt. Not physically at any rate. No one is lending support to the main industry of a miserable regime that came into power by overthrowing a democratically elected president.
However, cast your minds back a few decades. Europe wasn't short of miserable regimes. Their level of miserableness was also a question of degree. For a time, the Greeks could boast one of the most miserable. It was that miserable that when I crossed the border by train from Yugoslavia, a young Yugoslav was dragged off the train and beaten up on the platform in full view of everyone on the train. Moments later, the corridors were full of Greek hostesses, beaming brightly and welcoming everyone to Greece. But then again, Tito's Yugoslavia wasn't necessarily a shining example of tolerance. And nor was Franco's Spain and so nor was Mallorca. Spain's fascism may by then have become a comedy, sunglassed villain of fascism but it was still fascism.
One of the less considered aspects of Mallorca's rise to tourism domination in the sixties is the moral one. The argument in favour of foreign tourism to Mallorca was that tourism would help ordinary people. That it would also help the regime was indisputable, but the regime being helped would mean an improved economy and greater wealth. And, as things were to turn out, the argument was a correct one. The moral issue was one that exercised British politicians more than it did tourists. The British Government, certainly in the 1950s, had no time for Franco, and this was why it did all it could to prevent British businesspeople getting involved with Mallorca's nascent tourism industry. Not that it deterred these businesspeople. And once it became clear that the Americans didn't give a damn about fascism (or rather, gave a very big damn about communism) and were willing to pump vast amounts of dollars into Spain, then the British changed their tune.
There were attempts to boycott tourism to Mallorca. The British Communist Party proposed one in the early 1960s but dropped it on the advice of their Spanish comrades. The National Union of Mineworkers urged members not to go to Mallorca and Spain in 1969. Amnesty International put up posters in airports in 1970 that were designed to dissuade tourists.
The fact is that tourists took very little notice, if any. Were they morally wrong therefore? Perhaps it was a question of degree in a different sense; that of the level of awareness that was much lower then and is much higher today. Will this awareness have an impact on The Maldives? Maybe it will or maybe it won't. Tourism and morality are not the same thing.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Showing posts with label Morality. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Morality. Show all posts
Thursday, April 04, 2013
Tuesday, April 03, 2012
Taxing Tourists: Morality and promotion
Despite the regional government having dismissed the idea of introducing a tourist tax, the possibility of the Balearics getting such a tax is being taken increasingly seriously, if the coverage of the subject in the Spanish tourism media is to be believed (and it probably should be).
This is a subject I have considered in the past. Fundamentally, I am in favour of a tax if only on a sort of moral basis; tourists make use of resources, some of which are limited or become hard-pressed, so why should the burden for payment of these resources be solely down to businesses and residents.
There are of course reasons why a tax shouldn't be introduced. One is that it would add to the creep of stealth taxes that travellers are being expected to pay, such as with the British and German air duties. Increasingly, however, governments of all types are shifting the onus for state funding more and more on to the shoulders and wallets of the consumer, an example in the Balearics being the introduction, from 1 May, of the duty on petrol to help pay for the islands' bankrupt health service.
A point I have made in the past about a tourist tax in the Balearics is that the government would be well advised to wait and see what impact Catalonia's tourist tax (to come into effect in November) has on Catalonia's tourism. But it is the mere fact of Catalonia introducing its tax that is raising the possibility of one being implemented elsewhere.
The moral argument for a tourist tax can, however, be undermined by what it is intended to fund. Though the Balearics' old eco-tax was a fiasco, there was a moral justification for it. A similar justification is difficult if a tax is earmarked to pay for a region's tourism promotion, which is exactly how the government in Catalonia intends to spend it.
The question of morality goes straight out the window, however, if other regions see that a rival tourism destination is capable of pulling in some 100 million euros which are then lavished on promotion. Catalonia anticipates generating such an amount. With the Balearics having slashed its promotional budget to little more than nothing, with the Balearics Tourism Agency losing 20% of its staff and with national government stripping out a further 30% from the budget for the ministry which includes tourism, there is a very strong case for an alternative source of promotional funding to be created. Morality can go hang.
Catalonia might not generate its 100 million. The tax could backfire, which makes it even more advisable for the Balearics to hang fire, but there are pressures which might make the Balearic Government act, one of them coming from the hotel industry. It is looking on aghast at the lack of promotional spend and is as aghast at the prospect, if Catalonia's tax works, of a major increase in promotional effort from across the Balearic Sea.
The hotel industry's alarm at the promotional piggy bank being all but empty and at Catalonia's industry becoming like pigs in the muck of promotional spend from next year on is reasonable enough, though were it of a mind to, it could fund tourism promotion out of its small change. Meliá, for example, with total revenue in 2010 of 1,251 million euros is not exactly short of a bob or two. But why should the industry fund promotion? It pays its taxes presumably. Moreover, the hotels are well represented on the private Fomento del Turismo (i.e. the Mallorca Tourist Board), yet they seem incapable of helping it out of its financial hole, one left by the government having withdrawn its funding.
The government and the tourism industry, facing another record year, unless the unions manage to scupper it, can't afford to hope that records will keep on being broken. There has to be promotion, especially to the new markets they crave. Tourism minister Delgado, who has wielded or been forced to wield the promotional axe, seemed to get the message that an embarrassing presence at the recent Berlin travel fair should not be repeated, but where will the money come from to prevent such further embarrassments? Ten million or so tourists even at a meagre tax average of, say, two euros a pop would do nicely.
But would tourists stomach it? Would they find the notion of paying for promotion to attract other tourists morally defensible? In Catalonia, at least the government is being honest, but it is going to find out whether tourists place honesty over another demand on their wallets.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
This is a subject I have considered in the past. Fundamentally, I am in favour of a tax if only on a sort of moral basis; tourists make use of resources, some of which are limited or become hard-pressed, so why should the burden for payment of these resources be solely down to businesses and residents.
There are of course reasons why a tax shouldn't be introduced. One is that it would add to the creep of stealth taxes that travellers are being expected to pay, such as with the British and German air duties. Increasingly, however, governments of all types are shifting the onus for state funding more and more on to the shoulders and wallets of the consumer, an example in the Balearics being the introduction, from 1 May, of the duty on petrol to help pay for the islands' bankrupt health service.
A point I have made in the past about a tourist tax in the Balearics is that the government would be well advised to wait and see what impact Catalonia's tourist tax (to come into effect in November) has on Catalonia's tourism. But it is the mere fact of Catalonia introducing its tax that is raising the possibility of one being implemented elsewhere.
The moral argument for a tourist tax can, however, be undermined by what it is intended to fund. Though the Balearics' old eco-tax was a fiasco, there was a moral justification for it. A similar justification is difficult if a tax is earmarked to pay for a region's tourism promotion, which is exactly how the government in Catalonia intends to spend it.
The question of morality goes straight out the window, however, if other regions see that a rival tourism destination is capable of pulling in some 100 million euros which are then lavished on promotion. Catalonia anticipates generating such an amount. With the Balearics having slashed its promotional budget to little more than nothing, with the Balearics Tourism Agency losing 20% of its staff and with national government stripping out a further 30% from the budget for the ministry which includes tourism, there is a very strong case for an alternative source of promotional funding to be created. Morality can go hang.
Catalonia might not generate its 100 million. The tax could backfire, which makes it even more advisable for the Balearics to hang fire, but there are pressures which might make the Balearic Government act, one of them coming from the hotel industry. It is looking on aghast at the lack of promotional spend and is as aghast at the prospect, if Catalonia's tax works, of a major increase in promotional effort from across the Balearic Sea.
The hotel industry's alarm at the promotional piggy bank being all but empty and at Catalonia's industry becoming like pigs in the muck of promotional spend from next year on is reasonable enough, though were it of a mind to, it could fund tourism promotion out of its small change. Meliá, for example, with total revenue in 2010 of 1,251 million euros is not exactly short of a bob or two. But why should the industry fund promotion? It pays its taxes presumably. Moreover, the hotels are well represented on the private Fomento del Turismo (i.e. the Mallorca Tourist Board), yet they seem incapable of helping it out of its financial hole, one left by the government having withdrawn its funding.
The government and the tourism industry, facing another record year, unless the unions manage to scupper it, can't afford to hope that records will keep on being broken. There has to be promotion, especially to the new markets they crave. Tourism minister Delgado, who has wielded or been forced to wield the promotional axe, seemed to get the message that an embarrassing presence at the recent Berlin travel fair should not be repeated, but where will the money come from to prevent such further embarrassments? Ten million or so tourists even at a meagre tax average of, say, two euros a pop would do nicely.
But would tourists stomach it? Would they find the notion of paying for promotion to attract other tourists morally defensible? In Catalonia, at least the government is being honest, but it is going to find out whether tourists place honesty over another demand on their wallets.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
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