This Tourism Week Number 35 - Tourism: Know Your Enemy
Monday, 12 June 2004
THIS WEEK - The real threat to the tourism industry isn’t terrorism - it’s capitalism. And something about the barefootBenefit.
Tourism is facing its biggest threat ever, and it looks to me like the whole shebang could literally go up in smoke before people of my generation (I’m 45) have used up our allotted four-score-years-and-ten.
The threat doesn’t come from the possibility of international terrorism - it comes from the certainty of diminishing energy supplies. But what are the airline companies doing about it? Well, they’re telling their pilots to fly slower and to use just one engine when taxiing.
Now that’s what I call big thinking.
But you could also argue that it has completely missed the point.
Oil is a finite resource and even if the current price is high because the OPEC ministers need new palaces or because the President of the USA wears the wrong ties, the truth is that one way or another the price of oil will eventually go through the roof simply because oil will eventually become very scarce indeed.
And what are the airlines going to do when it just isn’t available any more? Panic?
And what are they going to do until then? Fly slower?
In order to win a war you need to know your enemy. And the enemies of tourism - and especially of sustainable tourism - are the international oil companies and the governments who support them.
You see, the problem is that the oil companies see themselves as oil companies - and not as energy companies. They’re content to pump the stuff out of the ground, to show ever-improving results and to pay huge dividends at the end of every year - which is as far as they seem to be able to look.
They don’t seem to have any real long-term vision - and oil is not a long-term resource.
Time is running out and we need to find viable alternates. And although I’m not one for legislation, I do believe that governments have a duty to lead by telling the oil companies to invest 10% of their profits into researching renewable energy sources. And then those same governments should ask consumers - including the airlines - to reward those that do by supporting them, and to boycott those that don’t.
Because the companies that don’t will have shown that they’re not interested in the long-term future of the modern economy.
There are viable alternate energy resources which won’t run out, and from what I’ve read it seems that hemp seed oil could be the most viable of all. But if you look at the history of hemp, you’ll find that the big oil companies were right behind the campaign to have it banned (they latched onto the ‘horrors of pot’ to win their grubby little war and yes, hemp seed oil and dagga do come from the same plant. But then methanol - which can kill you - and the alcohol we drink, ethanol, come from the same plant, too). I once read that if the United States gave just 10% of its agricultural land to growing hemp, it could satisfy the energy needs of its entire economy - and that would include its airline energy needs - in perpetuity.
My point, then, is twofold: that as long as we continue to rely on oil, high oil prices will be here to stay. And oil cannot sustain our industry into the future - or at least not into a long term future which goes beyond the next election or the next annual general meeting of shareholders.
The secret to winning any war is to know your enemy - and the enemy for tourism is the non-sustainability of the transport industry. Which is why, if we want to survive, we need to begin lobbying for massive research into other energy solutions.
And tourism would serve itself best if it took the lead in this regard.
My business, BarefootClients.co.za (www.barefootclients.co.za), provides communications services, strategy planning and creative thought for select clients who share our Barefoot On The Beach approach to business.
It’s simple. We believe that successful marketing creates relationships - friendships - between businesses and their customers.
Our job is to help you develop friendships with your clients: to make them so comfortable with you that they’ll happily walk Barefoot On The Beach with
you.
… because business works best between friends. That’s the barefootBenefit.
Want the barefootBenefit? contact me - martin@barefootclients.co.za or visit www.barefootclients.co.za
And Then There’s The Barefoot Work Ethic…
When BarefootClients.co.za (www.barefootclients.co.za) goes to work for a client, we commit to that client. We work openly and democratically. And we subscribe to Ricardo Semler’s concept of The Seven Day Weekend*. Which means that we work when it’s necessary and rest when it’s necessary - that we’re as happy to write on Sunday at 11:00 in the evening as we are to go to the movies on Monday at 10:00 in the morning.
The Seven Day Weekend is an important book - get it on line at www.barefootclients.co.za … It contains many lessons that apply as much to Semler’s high-tech inventory management business and to his manufacturing plants as they do to tourism - which for most of us is more than a job. It’s a way of life
Martin Hatchuel
63 Wilson Street, Hunter’s Home, PO Box 2690, Knysna 6570
Telephone +27(0)44 384 1810; Cell +27(0)82 448 2140
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