|
The President of the World Travel and Tourism Council, Jean-Claude Baumgarten, recently called on the tourism sector in the European Union to be more proactive in luring visitors from fast-growing markets in Asia, namely China and India, to ensure solid growth.
“Everyone is looking to get the biggest piece of that pie. The challenge for the EU is to be ready to attract visitors from these new markets.”
He said that the bloc must develop specially tailored marketing plans and hospitality programmes aimed at visitors from China and India as it did when Japan posted an explosion in outbound travellers more than a decade ago. But the Maltese government and the tourism industry are doing hardly anything substantial to tap this Asian market.
In 2001 Malta was the first European country to sign an agreement with China to facilitate the flow of tourists between the two countries. More than three years have passed. Since then millions of Chinese tourists have poured into top destinations of every continent, from Australia to Cuba. Since September 2004 Chinese tourists started also arriving in Europe. But Malta has so far lost out because it has failed to get its act together. Other European destinations, notably France, Italy and Switzerland have been quick to act and used the last few years to get ready to welcome Chinese tourists visiting them.
By 2020 there will be 100 million tourists visiting destinations in other parts of the world. The World Tourism Organisation already considers Chinese tourists coming from the most economically developed regions of Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou as the seventh largest spenders in the world market. Most of Chinese tourists still travel in groups, visit several countries on one trip and have high spending levels in destination countries.
This year France is working to get 800,000 Chinese tourists. In five years’ time they will rise to a million when they will become the biggest arrivals to France, ahead of the British, the Americans and the Japanese. In 2000 the French Tourism Ministry formed a China Committee bringing together managers from top stores, restaurants and tourist attractions in order to devise ways to best serve the Chinese clientele.
When the first Chinese tourists arrived in Paris on September 1 they found that the top attractions from the Louvre to the Galeries Lafayette department store had already printed floor maps in Mandarin and taught personnel a few Chinese phrases to welcome the huge influx of visitors. The Accor and InterContinental hotel chains have also jumped on the Beijing bandwagon, offering tea sets, Chinese newspapers and Asian-style breakfasts to customers craving the comforts of home.
For the foreseeable future Chinese tourism will be a ‘multi-destination’ package with trips to three or four European countries in eight to 10 days, France and Italy being the top spots. So Maltese tourism key players, from government to hotels, airlines and tour operators will have to team up with their European counterparts to attract Chinese tourists to Malta. We simply cannot afford to ignore China, the top growing tourism market for the future.
Still a colony
“There are exhibitions, concerts, musicals, band programmes, plays, poetry readings, vocal recitals, ballet performances, TV soaps, going on all the time and the problem is quality not quantity. We have more TV and radio stations but the quality of their cultural production is lower than when we had one national station,” says Joe Vella Bondin.
He finds very disturbing the facts revealed in the National Statistics Office theatre-goers 2004 survey: three quarters of the Maltese adult population does not go to the theatre and of those that go, less than two per cent attend orchestral concerts and only three per cent attend opera performances.
Joe thinks that not enough is being done to promote local culture, which he defines as “a country’s social heritage, or tradition, that is passed on to future generations.”
He laments: “I feel diminished when I find in the media reports of press conferences given by the highest authorities acclaiming presentations of foreign works while even essential concerts presenting local creations, such as, for example, the recently concluded APS sponsored and organized four-concert cycle of short sacred works by significant Maltese composers of the last three centuries, are almost totally overlooked. Another case in point was Malta’s EU-entry celebrations last April 30, when the musical background accompanying Gert Hof’s magnificent light sculptures was provided by a foreigner when an indigenous composition would have been much more appropriate on all counts.”
Joe thinks that cultural competitions are one way of raising local standards. “Up to a few years ago, we used to have so many different ones for musical pieces, for radio, television and stage plays, for poetry, for novels, etc. I am a great believer in contests, given the shortcomings of our limited market in the realm of theatrical presentations. I would like to see the founding of awards like the Olivier Awards in Britain. These are areas that I would have expected the Arts Council to become involved in immediately on its formation.”
Joe is dissatisfied with the work being done by the Arts Council. “It is with a deep sense of disappointment that I have to state that, after almost three years of life, the established Arts Council, funded through public funds, has yet to make any effective national impact. So far it has hardly improved on the achievements of the replaced Department of Culture.
“Surprisingly, the only Department initiative that the Council seems to have dropped is the Francis Ebejer playwriting competition, the only project that sought to do something for local mainstream dramaturgy, which is in core need of attention. What new ideas and initiatives has the Council generated? The most evident seems to be the magazine Kultura 21 whose main aim is to provide a calendar of cultural events. But there are better, more audience-effective ways for doing this and consequently its opportunity cost must be quite high.
“There may, of course, be other new initiatives that I know nothing about. If so they are hidden in the substantial sum of Lm396,744 that according to the 2004 published accounts the Council spent on what are designated as ‘General Cultural Activities’. I think it would be only fair on the Arts Council itself if exact details were given of what these were. Such would be the publication of meticulous lists of those receiving the monies, including names and amounts.”
I ask Joe how we can celebrate local talent without becoming insular. He dismisses that risk: “The problem that has to be addressed is the opposite: the openness and vulnerability of the Maltese nation and the tendency of the Maltese to run down everything Maltese make us still a colony in culture. What is happening is the squeezing out of the local writer, composer and artist to the detriment of national aspirations, sensibilities and distinctiveness. This ricochet effect is being further exacerbated by the performance policies of our public theatres.
“These need to be reviewed to create concrete schemes together with the Arts Council whereby entities that produce indigenous works are rewarded in some way. With regard to a national cultural policy, we do have a document on Malta’s Cultural Policy, which addresses most of the problems local culture is facing, and I support the solutions it proposes whole-heartedly. But the pertinent question is: are the conclusions of this vital document being carried out? Or was its commissioning and publication an end in itself and not a channel through which policies would then be implemented?”
evaristbartolo@hotmail.com
|
