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Cyprus is enjoying an unprecedented boom in tourism, due mainly to the extended season, as well as continued risks faced by other rival destinations. However, according to the World Tourism Organisation, global travel continues to rise, with other regions enjoying far greater increases than Cyprus.
On the other, one must also ask, how long this wave will last. It’s not good enough saying that Cyprus is adopting ‘sustainable tourism’, that our beaches are some of the finest and cleanest in Europe, that Paphos is co-hosting the European Culture Capital and that our product is diversifying to include sports tourism, religious tourism, and other variants.
Even the chairman of the Cyprus Tourism Organisation, Angelos Loizou, talking on a chat programme on state radio last week said that we should not be too complacent with the record arrivals, and that all stakeholders ought to ensure that the best quality in service is being offered.
This is key, because all one has to do is compare the grumpy waiters in Cyprus to the overly helpful ones in the Middle East, including Turkey, while simple budget meals are still far more expensive here than they are in Greece, let alone a bottle of water that is ridiculously overpriced. Even the shoddy service at passport controls at airports is giving us a bad reputation.
Furthermore, tourists who opted not to travel to Turkey can still do so by taking a walking tour or bus ride to the north and enjoy the virgin beaches, as well as the ‘oriental feel’, where once again service in restaurants is far more generous and genuine than on this side. Actually, it is reminiscent of the good old days when Cyprus used to pride itself of its ‘filoxenia’ or hospitality, a culture that seems to have disappeared with the commercialisation of society.
Cyprus needs a wake-up call. Our service needs to be improved and our prices must become more competitive. But with the CTO soon to be transformed into a bigger white elephant when it becomes one of the three Under-Secretariats, supervision, strategy and planning will deteriorate, as civil service mentality will prevail.
The gamble is not to accommodate a second bumper year in arrivals, but to see whether this number can be sustained over the next few years and identify the real reasons for this success.
Otherwise, it will be just be yet another marking ploy by the administration to dupe the public that everything is improving, so long as we can last until the next presidential elections.
