The new Minister of Commerce, Industry and Tourism has a golden opportunity to push through some radical reforms in the government’s ailing tourism infrastructure.
Having been recruited from the trade sector where he was known to be a man of bold decisions, one would expect Minister Antonis Michaelides to grab the bull by the horns and wrestle with the monster that is the “Tourism White Elephant”.
The best place to start is the Cyprus Tourism Organisation, which is still suffering from an identity crisis and has yet to decide whether it is an administrative department of the government (which has no concrete policy on tourism) or whether it has the best interests of the tourism sector in mind.
The lack of planning, despite the over-exaggerated Ten Year Strategy, that later became a seven-year plan and has now been demoted to a five-year paper, resulted in no new golf courses to attract the quality tourists, no marinas, pathetic-looking pavements and few bicycle paths. The cherry on the cake of course is the ill-planned 300% hike in airport fees by the new operator that has already been labelled a “rip off” by the travel industry.
The marketing and promotion campaigns have always been ineffective or even dubiously awarded, while the few good things about tourism are solely credited to the private sector.
The only major success the government can be credited with was the package of tax incentives announced earlier this year for hoteliers to abandon their operating licences and transform their properties for other use, in effect reducing the number of hotel beds. Other minor successes have been the occasional, but one-off measures, such as the withdrawal of airport taxes for a short period of time to allow airlines and travel companies to adjust to regional crises or rising fuel prices.
For as long as the Constitution binds the government to a limited number of cabinet posts, one of whom has the Tourism portfolio, then at least two other actions should get the Minister’s urgently attention.
There are 19 pending applications for the long-overdue vacant post of Director General of the CTO. This begs two questions: if the CTO has been operating without a DG all this time, does it really need one? And, will the outgoing board do the morally right thing and complete the process of interviewing the candidates in time before the new board takes over at the end of August?
The Cabinet should push through the earliest possible appointment and Minister Michaelides should then assign the new Director General with the immediate task of starting to reform the CTO so that it can be restructured from a regulatory administrative government department to a market-driven organisation that will have the flexibility and power to enforce any tourism strategy plan, even of its own, in cooperation with the private sector for the benefit of the whole economy.
