for a host of reasons – cultural, historical, psychological and of course, economic.
The immediate challenge We believe that selling people a holiday is essentially no different than selling people cars or pens or shoes. You provide them with a product they find attractive and exceptional service at a price they
think represents good value. That is the simple core of the business. However, beyond that core, things become very tricky, very quickly. Tourism is not a science, it's an art, and there are as many adjustable variables in the art of tourism as there are colours in the palette, especially when you are selling an experience. Let me outline some of the obvious ones. With a country like Bermuda, there are two kinds of tourist – those who travel by air and stay in hotels and those who travel on cruise ships. They are very different people, who are attracted to different things, and whose impact on our economy is different. Air visitors, as we call them, tend to stay longer, get more involved in the experience of Bermuda and spend roughly eight times more per capita than their ship born travellers. Cruise ship passengers, unless you're careful, can have their holiday experience almost without coming ashore at all. The two types of tourist also
have different tastes. They buy different things, use transport
differently, have different tastes in food and are attracted to different types of entertainment. This is not a circumstance confined to Bermuda by any means. Islands like ours have to try to make sure that each type of tourist gets what they want. That can be difficult because there are sometimes strongly held feelings in communities about which type of tourist is better, which type of tourist should count for most in the shaping of the country's infrastructure and style, for lack of a better word. So that's a couple of important variables in the business – first, the need to sell to and satisfy two quite disparate groups of people, and second, the need to judge in what proportions the two should visit. What our visitors have in
common is that most of them come from the north-eastern part of the United States. That means that the principal Bermuda sales effort must be in that part of the world. We try to attract tourists from other parts of North America, and from Europe, but we realize that those sales
The Parliamentarian | 2009: Issue One - Bermuda | 5
Opposite page: the farming industry in Bermuda; Above: A cruise ship coming into Bermuda; Left: The unofficial national flower of Bermuda, the Bermudiana flower.