Chatting with a tour operator friend reveals hearsay evidence of what we’ve long suspected and will likely be confirmed by statistics (if they’re released) that volume tourism means more is less. Our friend tells us that since the new mega ships can cut costs based on volume, cruises have become more accessible for lower classes of tourists. While indeed everyone deserves a vacation it sounds like a far cry from the type of tourists we used to cater to and a lot less likely that they’ve got the disposable income to blow to sustain our own.
The word on the ground suggests that tourists who hunt for the cheapest vacation are not proving to be big spenders when it comes to leaving the ship. Dockyard restaurants are described as being as busy for lunch as dinner on a Friday or Saturday night. Not packed, but reasonably filled. That may seem reasonable until you realize that two cruise ships means and extra 6000 people and they usually aren’t here on the weekends.
As we’ve covered before, while government may get it’s head tax to slowly pay off the many millions it’s invested in the dockyard piers, are Bermudians really better off? More volume means a higher expectation for price competition. More price competition means lower profits for higher people served. Lower profits for higher people served means lower wages and more stress. Higher people served means higher frustration and lower quality of service. Lower wages means more low skilled expats filling jobs Bermudians could have been filling. More low skilled expats means more packing into homes saving every penny so they can live the good life when they return to their own home countries. It seems everyone is winning, except Bermudians.
Let’s remember, cruise ship profits are funneled off island. That means all jobs on the cruise ships are foreign as are most earnings. We collect no taxes from those workers. All spending on accommodation, food and entertainment (even casinos) on those cruise ships all goes to the cruise ship companies. Taking a cursory view here, for all the money we’ve blown on the new piers and all the hassle we’re going through over the “'we’re risking destroying tourism if we don’t approve casinos on cruise ships'” we well could have skipped the middle man, spent the pier money on purchasing and outfitting our own luxury cruise ship and had all spending go to Bermudians and Bermudian businesses. Just a thought.
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