Tourist trade won’t vote for Christmas when setting out strategy for Edinburgh
Cliff Hague rightly condemns the fact that control of Edinburgh’s tourism strategy has been handed over to an unaccountable trade lobby acting collaboratively with the council (“Edinburgh is now a city effectively run by tourist industry”, 30 July).
Mass tourism has become the city’s’s cash-crop economy, comparable to clear-fell logging in Brazil’s rainforest as far as its carbon footprint is concerned, though as a business model perhaps more akin to Tanzania’s disastrous ground nuts scheme, which the British government finally abandoned in 1951 after discovering that it was about as clever as setting up a banana plantation on the Isle of Skye.
Hoteliers, naturally, like to rack up as many bed nights as they can, while airport managers maximise throughput by attracting as many flights as possible to their airports. Such pack-’em-in objectives rarely correspond with a managed tourism strategy, as we are discovering to our cost.
These are the last interests which should be steering a tourism strategy implementation group – this initiative has “conflict of interest” written all over it.
The business model’s inherent fragility arises from any number of unforeseen factors. What if the slow-down in China’s economic growth leads the government of the People’s Republic to encourage home-based tourism, rather than overseas trips by its nationals? What if no Scottishthemed US TV series should follow Outlander? What if the recently leaked EU proposals to tax aviation fuel are put into effect, with an inevitable hike in ticket prices? What if Edinburgh’s voters decide they’ve had enough of civic degradation, and vote accordingly?
It is also evident that Edinburgh’s uncontrolled expansion of Airbnb letting is undermining an ever-expanding hotel sector which has long exceeded the council’s own predicted target figure. What if, for example, the Royal High School hotel proposal gets the go-ahead from Scotland’s ministers, then turns out to be a white elephant. Possibly the proposed operator, Rosewood, will have some interesting alternatives; after all, its parent company has several connections with the casino trade.
DAVID J BLACK Glanville Place, Edinburgh