Tourism
Shangri-Lost
Paradise Isn't Enough Anymore In the South Pacific
First, the bad news. Tourism in the South Pacific has been hurting. The pain is not felt uniformly throughout the region and the causes are not always the same, but the affliction is there, nonetheless.
The symptoms have been evident for some time, even before the region received an additional battering from the ramifications of global terrorism, the conflict in Iraq and SARS. "The impending war [in Iraq] has done terrible things to our bookings this year," a representative of PNG's Melanesian Tourist Services told me in March. But the background causes are many, and include long-time lows in the value of currencies in the major markets, particularly Australia, but also New Zealand and Japan.
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Short term remedies include the lowest-priced package deals offered in the region's main destinations for many years, including Fiji, Vanuatu and the normally pricey New Caledonia. The Pacific Area Travel Association's man in the South Pacific, Ian Kennedy, describes the situation as "a crisis of consumer confidence" in travel generally.
Apart from revenues, the health of tourism is usually diagnosed in visitor numbers: so, a word or two about them. Tourism figures seem to sit somewhere along Mark Twain's famous continuum of "lies, damned lies and statistics." They may not lie damnably, but they fib selectively and they have to be deconstructed in order to be fully comprehended.
The category "visitor arrivals" almost always includes business visitors and those who say they are visiting relatives, in addition to the vacationers-the real, money-spending tourists. For some countries this can make a vast difference between a relatively modest, but accurate, tourist record and an impressive, but quite misleading, one. Last year, for example, Samoa, recorded 88,960 visitors, making it seemingly the fourth most popular tourist destination in the South Pacific Islands. But 37,707 of these were "other Pacific Islanders," overwhelmingly from American Samoa, and 23,790 were from New Zealand, mainly Samoans. Indeed, almost 36 per cent of all visitors came from the U.S. territory next door. Visitors who gave "holiday" as the reason for their visit amounted to 27,232, and even the term "holiday" often conceals more than it reveals, as figures from PNG regularly illustrate. One example doesn't make an argument, but you get the point. Does it matter? You bet, because tourism planning consultants have been known to base their plans partly on these somewhat dodgy figures.
Pacific Islands tourism has perennial problems, so consistent that they have become traditional, to use a word much favored by tourism marketers. Some of these are recognized by the South Pacific Tourism Organization in the recently released draft of its Strategy for Growth. The list of usual suspects includes: Distances from major markets and each other, poor (barely existent in some cases) regional transport links, constraints on investment, varied and complex cultural values, especially in relation to land tenure, hospitality and so on.
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There is also chicken and egg issue (which comes first, the new hotel rooms or the increase in aircraft capacity?), and the constant tension between regional cooperation and individual competition. The SPTO may think of the South Pacific as a region, but international visitors think of it as a number of specific destinations.
Then there is the weather: the prolonged South Pacific cyclone season, usually defined as from November to March or April, can reach into mid-June, making the period of weather-safe travel in the Pacific not much more than four months. Perversely, the height of the cyclone season is when the cruise companies reposition their ships for South Pacific cruising.
Interestingly, though, there is heightened awareness, after many decades of operations, of the significance of cruise shipping to the region-at least favored parts of it, like French Polynesia, New Caledonia and Vanuatu. The French Territories have already acknowledged this on their own tourism Web sites. New Caledonia devotes several pages to cruise information. P&O plans to introduce a third ship to its Sydney-based fleet, a decision that will benefit mainly New Caledonia and Vanuatu.
Social and political disturbances are becoming more frequent in a region long regarded as socially and politically benign, and still so regarded in most tourism literature. (The SPTO cautiously refers to the region's "relative safety"). Solomon Islands is the most obvious case: "Why would anyone come here?" author Paul Theroux once asked rhetorically.
On a visit to there some years ago, I asked about tourism. "Good God!" said the man from the Australian High Commission, "the place can barely sustain day-to-day existence, let alone tourism." Recently, many people have been saying the same thing, as Solomon Islands progressively self-destructs. Its official Web site claims that the country "has been called the last Paradise on earth." Given its present condition, no further comment seems necessary.
It hasn't helped that Australians, the country's major market, have been advised by their Department of Foreign Affairs for some time to "to defer all holiday travel to Solomon Islands." In the current crisis, Australian tourists are unlikely to return for quite a while. There are also security advisories out for Papua New Guinea and, at a slightly lower level, for Vanuatu, New Caledonia and Fiji. The U.S. State Department goes a giant step further and issues a Primer on personal security for visitors to Papua New Guinea.
If there is one condition the Pacific does have an excess of it is "Paradise." This timeworn tourism expression is traceable at least back to 1768 and Bougainville's encounter with Tahiti, where he felt he had been, "transported to the garden of Eden." In 2003 it represents a really bad case of image fatigue. It is disappointing to find that for all its new strategy and enhanced marketing and educational aims, the SPTO is still clinging to this outmoded and clichéd concept. It has become a global cliché which has been applied to almost every part of almost every country at some time or another. In any case, Vanuatu wrung the last drop of use out of it a few years ago, with a marketing campaign that stuck the tired term onto almost everything the republic possessed, except its government. "We are the true Paradise now," the then-director of tourism said to me, with a perfectly straight face.
If the heavy-weights in South Pacific tourism-Fiji, French Polynesia, New Caledonia, Cook Islands-have their problems, what can be said about the really poor relations, Kiribati, Nauru, Niue and Tuvalu? They constitute the PDG (Perennially Disadvantaged Group) of TFDs (Tourism Fringe Dwellers).
What can be said about Nauru anyway? It is not a member of SPTO, although it considered becoming one, and thought briefly about becoming more tourist-friendly, which, a recent visitor told me, simply meant they didn't send you back on the next plane.
If distance, poor connections and erratic markets are problems for the major destinations, what hope do these countries have? And if visitors do make it to any of them, what will they see? Houses of traditional woven thatch? No. Houses of concrete block, many of which looked squalid from the moment of their construction.
If all of this sounds pretty grim, there is a glimmer of light on the horizon. PATA has initiated "Project Phoenix," a US$ 1 million public relations campaign, which, says Ian Kennedy, is "designed to mitigate the negativity" towards travel to the Asia-Pacific region.
Ili Matatolu, Regional Director of the Fiji Visitors Bureau, says that, although visitor forecasts were revised downwards, "there has been an overall mood of optimism" in the future of Fiji tourism. There had better be, especially as tourism years ago became the country's biggest revenue earner. Tahiti, the original Pacific Paradise, has reported upward trends in a number of income categories, of which tourism is one.
Kennedy is somewhat more bullish, as seems appropriate for someone who has seen regional tourism weather any number of crises. "Let's forget about those old bugbears that we have bitched about for decades," he says. "Let's just go out and blow our trumpets. Aside from getting some folk to visit, it will make us feel good."
South Pacific Islands
2002 Visitor Arrivals by Destination
| Destination | Total 2002 |
| Cook Islands | 72,781 |
| Fiji | 397,859 |
| French Polynesia | 189,030 |
| Kiribati | 4,288 (Jan-Sept only) |
| New Caledonia | 103,933 |
| Niue | 1,632 |
| Papua New Guinea | 53,842 |
| Samoa | 88,960 |
| Solomon Islands | 1,513 (Jan-April only) |
| Tonga | 36,585 |
| Tuvalu | 1,236 |
| Vanuatu | 49,463 |
| TOTAL | 999,249 |
