We would like to express our personal thanks for your confidence for all these months of collaboration which I hope will prove us worthy of our latest project fruit of our desire to take marketing in Tourism to the next level. We are elaborating a report...
Cyprus Mail could use some more objective reporting
about issues and be less blatant about supporting hidden agendas.
Surely
everyone is entitled to an opinion, but coming from a ' respectable media', I
feel it's easy to be sitting on the sidelines just relating facts with sole
interest of riding the wave of disgruntlement and contributing to the
senselessness of how certain businesses are run.
We have an endemic problem, and more serious issues
than managerial obstacles at the CTO and as Barbara expressed it "Your people
were loved for their warmth and hospitality and their strong pride in all
tradition, it’s like they have died inside or cannot be bothered anymore with
visitors most of the time".
Tourism hasn't fallen upon hard times, it's about a
model needing adjustment, mass tourism can no longer be supported in Cyprus.
When I speak about mass tourism, I mean that both online
and offline can no longer support an impersonal, hiding behind massive
advertising impersonal campaigns in hope that this will attract people which
value authentic hospitality and are ready to pay a reasonable price for it. The
influx of massive tourism, although has contributed to making ‘tourism
supermarket’ owners wealthy, we are paying now the price for negative publicity
written by people who care about how accessible Cypriot hospitality used to be.
This is not about the price issue, it’s about how scarce a truly Cypriot product
has become and the worry that this product will become
extinct.
There is undeniably a need for a shift in model and it’s
not a task just for the CTO but maybe as an industry or even as a country. As a
whole as we realise that tourism has less economic weight which will translate
into getting less support, energy and desire to pursue a leading role into
making this shift. As time goes on, tourism will become less relevant and
consequently will command fewer resources and thus certain issues will remain
unresolved by professionals.
I’m sure there are other relevant questions for us to
ask ourselves, but fundamentally, which of these will enable us to push for a
tourism that is sustainable, preserves the island's balance for years to come
and restores economic value behind authentic hospitality?