IF you have the interests of the tourism industry at heart, it’s difficult to know whether you should be praising tourism’s leaders for the improvement in the figures, or criticising them for the lack of progress. Guess which approach I’m going to take.

Yes, it¹s time yet again to complain about the lack of effort being made in turning around the tourism sector. We bend over backwards to help the finance industry as we should, and we are putting much more effort into diversifying the economy. But tourism still suffers from benign neglect.

But surely things are looking up for the industry? There’s a bucketload of new investment going into the tourism sector, and there are more visitors about than a couple of years ago. That’s all true, but the progress so far is hardly perceptible. What little improvement there has been in the figures could also easily be reversed this year. There is certainly no sign yet of an upwards trend being created.

The reason for my renewed pessimism is the recently published report on the tourism industry in 2007. The minister responsible has been able to latch on to a couple of figures to make it look as though real progress was made last year. A closer look reveals how fragile is that progress.

For example, in his foreword to the report, the Economic Development Minister was able to point to increased visitor numbers in 2007 ‘for the first time in a number of years’. (Incidentally, I hate that old journalism trick of referring to a ‘number of years’ just because you can’t be bothered to find out how many years.) In fact, the number of staying leisure visitors in 2007 was 375,860, a 2.1% increase on the figure for the previous year. Not bad, you might say.

Unfortunately 2006 was an awful year, so we are talking about an improvement on a very low point. The 2007 figure for staying visitors was actually the second lowest on record. Ten years ago the figure for staying visitors was 590,000.

Last year,s figures also show that the length of stay was down and although on-Island expenditure increased by 3.5%, this was only 0.4% when inflation was taken into account.

There was some good news about business visitors. The number of business travellers staying was up 16.8%, the length of stay was also up 4.8% and the on-Island spend also increased by 23% even after taking inflation into account.

The number of conference visitors was also up, but the length of stay was down and total on-Island expenditure of £5m was down a couple of million from ten years ago.

The grand total spent by all types of visitor last year came to £234m, which was 1.9% more than 2006 in real terms, but once again that was a low point.

It was actually below the five year average and doesn’t compare with 2003 when spending was £247m (reflated to 2007 prices).

But at least we can say that the figures are edging into positive territory, which is obviously good news, but it’s impossible to say whether this can be sustained. With increasing problems in the UK economy – on which tourism is dangerously reliant – the season could be a tough one.

There is much more optimism about and the Economic Development Minister is certainly doing his bit to bolster confidence. He said: ‘The future continues to look bright, with positive early year arrivals data in 2008 which when coupled with the enormous investments which have been made in the Jersey product should sustain a continuation of the growth in visitor numbers.’ He is certainly right to suggest that the industry is investing heavily for the future. But what is the States doing to help this revival? It would appear precious little.

For years the Tourism Development Fund has been raided to pay for projects which should have been funded through normal budgets, and what public investment has gone into helping to expand air routes, for example (£750,000 last year), has been as much for the good of the finance sector as for tourism. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but we shouldn’t use that to try to hide the small amount of effort being put into tourism.
It would help if there was a plan, of course. Then we could tell whether the efforts were producing the desired result. But nobody knows where the industry is supposed to be going.

There have been plans in the past. Take ‘Making a Difference’, for example.
That was drawn up in 2004 to revitalise tourism in the Island over the next five years, ie to 2009.
Among the priorities were: increase visitor spending to £300m per annum, increase and stabilise the number of staying visitors at 450,000, spread the season, diversify the market base, reduce the average age of visitors and increase the number of first-time visitors.

I will leave it to you to decide how successful that has been.
It’s not as though the States can fall back on any good excuses as to why tourism continues to suffer as agriculture has. There were global trends affecting the farming industry, over which we had no control, but you can’t say that about tourism. Yes, there’s more competition, but the industry is also growing considerably. It just needs more effort, a bit of imagination and public investment as well as private, to ensure we enjoy just a tiny slice of a huge market on our doorstep (and that isn’t just the UK).
So, yes, we can congratulate ourselves that the leisure tourism figures went up last year for the first time in ten years, but is that all we can expect for a decade or more of effort?
Peter Body is editor of
Business Brief magazine