.
How awkward it must be for the chairman of the Cyprus Tourism Organisation to plead to parliament not to slash his organisation’s budget, at a time when our MPs ought to have raised the amount that the CTO spends to promote Cyprus, not cut it. The smaller the marketing budget, the fewer the visitors and less earnings for the hoteliers, the whole tourism and leisure industry, and of course, the government. Could it be that simple?
Mandarins in the Finance Ministry have already been slashing the CTO’s budget relentlessly for the past few years from 90-odd million euros a few years back, down to 71.3 mln, then to 67.2 mln and now to 62.5 mln for 2012. The intention here is to cut elsewhere in order to ensure the civil servants’ own salaries remain intact and “who cares about tourism?”.
Surely, our lawmakers could have had the foresight to demand that the CTO contains its operational budget within the general spirit of public austerity, while doubling its marketing budget in order to attract more tourists from Germany (that is enjoying an economic recovery), Israel, Scandinavia and Russia, by targeting outlying regions.
Several middle-class towns have mushroomed across Russia in recent years to accommodate the growing needs of newly-wealthy and successful entrepreneurs. This category of high net-worth individuals is increasingly searching out holiday and long-term destinations, with Cyprus theoretically at the top of their list.
Special-interest tourism is also a neglected and poorly promoted part of our tourist product, with the only good thing going for us being the Wine Routes and Nature Trails. Our favourable weather throughout the year and ease of connectivity around the island ought to have been our strongest selling point to boost sports, cultural and religious tourism, with our biggest failure to date being unable to capitalise on Pope Benedict’s historical visit to Cyprus.
Parliament wants to show it still has some say in executive matters by using the legislature to control the government, but it has also been weak in its inability to stand up to the government and send the CTO budget back to the administration in order to be revised upwards, probably the only public service that needs to.
Many people in the industry, frustrated by this schizophrenic situation, are probably thinking: “If I was a CTO board member, I would quit!”
