Trump card
Peter Gray, an independent Motivation Consultant, presents a regular Business Events News feature on current issues in the Conference and Incentive industries.
BY NOW I suspect that most Australians are fed up to the back teeth with one word: Trump. We’ve put up with it for more than a year and I don’t intend to subject readers of BEN to a diatribe either in favour or against him. But his promised actions do bring some aspects of American culture into stark focus and not least of these is tourism, in all its incarnations.
Apart from promising to ban a whole raft of potential tourists from entering the USA there’s little else that Trump seems to want to change in this area and yet in many respects the USA is way behind much of the rest of the world when it comes to business events, to its detriment.
The Australian/USA dollar exchange rate is not helping anyone intent on travelling to the USA at the moment but the practice by hotels of quoting basic rates to which must be added state taxes, federal taxes, possibly resort fees and then charges for just about everything else including porterage, per item and service charges. In the USA these alone are heading into the stratosphere and make even a reasonable meal a considerable expense. And this doesn’t include tips. I’m someone that believes, obviously naively, that a tip should be earned by exceptional service (on the assumption that the service charge covers normal service) but clearly this rule doesn’t apply to our American cousins.
A conference or an incentive travel reward to a USA destination is no longer a cheap option.
For a country that did not have a unified tourism bureau until comparatively recently while the rest of the world were busy developing theirs our American cousins don’t seem to be willing to learn the necessary lessons to attract business events or tourists in general.
American airlines (in general) are not a patch on what most Australians and New Zealanders have come to expect from most airlines that serve both our countries. Their custom of overbooking and then offering payment for passengers not to travel seems unbelievable to most of us - and adds another level of complexity when airline staff don’t recognise that a group is travelling on a flight! And although security is supposed to be paramount in these days of terrorist activity I have experienced some very substantial lapses whilst waiting for flights to pull back from airbridges in the USA.
So, Mr. President-elect, if you want to improve the lot of working Americans in the tourism and hospitality industries why not legislate to make hotels and restaurants pay their staff a decent basic rate and cut their dependency on tips; get hotels to quote only tax inclusive rates and eliminate resort fees which are often only an excuse to charge more.