Sir,
I’ve been reading recent correspondence about the decline in tourist industry standards with interest. I agree that hotel development has been too much for too long and that standards in some places have fallen.
I think one of the reasons is that overdevelopment has led to a huge demand for seasonal workers. Large numbers of these are engaged from abroad each year, especially from Eastern Europe. They are usually badly paid and badly treated. Cypriots would not work for the wages they get and there are fewer and fewer experienced, skilled Cypriot workers in the tourist industry.
The status of underskilled, undervalued people is reflected in the service they offer. They are not professionals and, as I know to my cost, the standard of their work certainly isn’t professional. I visited a well-known hotel in Pernara for several years before settling here. It was great – excellent service, food and atmosphere. Now I wouldn’t go there if you paid me.
Another factor is the quality of tourist coming here. In the past, Cyprus was rather an upmarket destination. It has always been more expensive to come here than to go to a Costa but that was OK. Then came the rise of the all-inclusive holiday. It seems that rather than actually visit the country they are in, many all-inclusive tourists prefer to sit round the pool all day drinking – well, they’ve paid for it haven’t they. Their behaviour is loutish and their money never makes it into the wider economy – only into the pockets of already rich hotel chain companies. A friend of mine who worked at an all-inclusive hotel summed it up beautifully when he said, “They order food when they’re not hungry and drink when they’re not thirsty.”
There has also been a rapid and visible decline in the behaviour of visitors to the island. They treat waiting staff with little respect and I remember an incident when a tourist insisted it wasn’t midnight yet so he should get his drinks for nothing. When the barman went to get the manager, the man stole the drinks. I remonstrated with him, telling him that it was the barman’s job to apply the rules and his response was “F*** him and ****his job”. That’s the kind of piggish attitude many staff have to deal with on a daily basis. It is the kind of attitude that leads, ultimately, to tourists murdering a local boy as they did last year and, as happened to my daughter last week, hitting residents’ cars with their drunkenly driven rental bike then speeding off without stopping to give insurance details or even to see if anyone was hurt. Sadly, a large number of these louts come from England, which is still seen as the main market for tourism.
It seems to be that if we want large numbers of tourists from Britain, we have to put up with some of them being trash.
I don’t condone bad service but I can understand it.
Dealing with such low-class people on a daily basis is soul destroying and, frankly, Cyprus doesn’t need them. There should be a halt to tourist development right now. Many of the bars and restaurants we already have are not full, even in high season. Hundreds of tourist beds are empty. We should think about the quality of tourist industry we want here and not just the quantity.
Alexandra Waugh
Paralimni
