Time for a fighting chance

So we smile to welcome those travellers; they are a boon and a blessing and a prism for possibility. We don’t turn the lights out on them. We invite them to dive deeply into our culture 

So much hinges here in Sri Lanka on the tourism industry and it has for some time. As an industry that attracts foreign exchange and has the highest ‘value added’ quotient in its offerings compared to other industries, the return on energy, ‘ROE’, is substantial. 

In fact, the never-ending Covidian hysteria and delirium (scrupulously inflating risks while downplaying overwhelmingly high recovery rates and age stratification) continued to undermine this critical national asset and resource. 

If we leave aside for now comparisons with the Maldives who managed to ply the pandemic to have one of their greatest seasons of tourism in their history, and look to more prosaic examples, we can see there was a wide range of outcomes available even while being rationally prudent. 

If we take a look at Morocco with 38 million people (so, in our rough weight class compared to, say, India or Indonesia), we see that while they had a vast drop in tourism in 2021, they still managed to bring in close to 6 million! This while we were manically opening and shutting the country and frustrating even the attempts of our locals to travel and offer solvency to hotels, restaurants and cities at a desperately needed time. 

The total number of deaths ascribed to COVID in both countries is roughly 15,000. In neither case does this represent the leading cause of death or any excess mortality. Moreover, Morocco was far less stringent, far more open, clearly far more welcoming of travel and tourism, and they only benefited from doing so.

The year-to-date, 2022 January to May, Sri Lanka has seen roughly 350,000 tourists. Morocco, by contrast, has seen 6 million and this is ahead of their prime season. 

Our average spend per tourist has been roughly $ 556 per tourist over the past six months. That is ludicrously low. Leave aside Morocco’s annual forecast of over $ 8 billion in terms of absolute economic contribution from tourism, if you ask foreign travellers anecdotally as I frequently do, they will say for their trips they budget somewhere in the vicinity of $ 1,000 a day for a couple travelling together (hotel, food, travel, fees, taxes, insurance). 

If we were to even slash this by half for a highly attractive but still developing market like Sri Lanka to $ 250 per person per day – outside the backpacker or the minimalist eco crowd – for a five-day trip, we should be close to double in terms of per tourist income. And most people come for longer stays. 

So, not only were we, even before the economic wheels came off in April/May, getting a relative trickle of tourists, our ability to offer them high value added and profitable experiences clearly needed some work. 

The assets are largely there but need to be revitalised through being imaginatively offered and curated and enhanced by world-class service. 

It would be good here to distinguish between ‘hospitality’ which radiates from the remarkable warmth and generosity of the Sri Lankan character, and ‘service’ which has to do with hard core deliverables that tangibly enhance the experience of those who visit us and travel across this otherwise seductive island. 

And so, in giving ourselves a “tourism report card,” we must do far more than pay attention to sheer volume, important though that is.

 

Global volatility

The world is too volatile for us to continue to be. Leaving aside the Ukraine conflagration for now, the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade which sent the United States itself careening into days and nights of highly charged demonstrations, protests and unrest. 

For observers outside the US, it may seem like an outcry about abortion rights. The real issue though is that the Supreme Court extended their ruling beyond the Mississippi case which was actually before the Court to decide (which banned abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy, not an outright ban). 

The Supreme Court opted to become an overall advisory body and the dubious constitutional scaffolding of the original ruling of Roe v Wade (no matter how morally compelling some may say it is) came into conflict with the notion of ‘judicial restraint’. 

I raise this point here to show that highly charged and emotional decisions are being confronted worldwide from war and peace to medical passports and personal physical autonomy to food and energy crises and buckling supply chains, to the nature of personhood. And so while we necessarily seek short term help from others, we must seek to also show our capability to help ourselves, as energy and will have a lot of demands being placed on them globally.

How not to communicate 

The Wall Street Journal ran an article quoting the Sri Lankan Prime Minister essentially saying the Sri Lankan economy had collapsed. The next day journals reported news of soaring inflation and massive civil protests in Ecuador saying, ‘Yesterday Sri Lanka, today Ecuador.’

It will be clear to everyone that these are damning headlines to be read by tourists, perhaps even donors or partners. Now the PM’s statement was just one plank in an otherwise fairly balanced speech. This was the basis for points he was making about how we need to unify, focus and galvanise. Plucked out of context it read like an obituary. 

Similarly, we are not Ecuador which is already on an IMF restructuring program and the revolts taking place are actually a result of the taxes, price increases and other austerity measures. 

This is why it is so crucial that while we take some of our medicine in terms of fiscal discipline, we gear up our export sectors and particularly multiply tourist numbers and tourist spend as the fastest route back to solvency, stability and economic equilibrium. Getting our migrant workers and diaspora comfortable using mainstream banking channels has to be the third focal area. And so, our communication has to be about the way forward and steps being taken, not a dirge about present woes. 

Our message has to be, “We are a great bet. We have always been resilient, and we are ready to rebound. We will help stabilise South Asia, we will create a service hub and thriving port city. We have the resources, the education levels, the human capital. We got waylaid, but we are committed to coming back and rightsizing the government and creating the best environment for enterprise. You will be investing in a strong and sound partner and collaborator going forward.”

How not to treat tourists

There is an obliviousness afoot in the land that seems to beggar the imagination. The Australians are here for Cricket Test Matches and were met with such a tidal wave of enthusiasm and gratitude in Galle that they were literally overwhelmed. Sri Lankans blessed them for coming, for not jumping on the global media bandwagon which is trying to paint the island and its people as pariahs. 

The gushing warmth was Sri Lanka at its best: passionate, loving, grateful, with a marvellous brew of human gratitude and national pride. And all the people accompanying the cricketers, entourage, fans and more, are a marvellous opportunity for Galle to offer hospitality and to be featured globally through social media and otherwise. 

However, with a blithe indifference to this opportunity, the rolling power cuts hit each evening from 7 to 9 p.m. plunging this gracious city into darkness. High end restaurants scrambling for black market diesel may be able to keep their lights on, but a maze of darkened streets is not a beckoning welcome. People just don’t come out. 

Why, for a tourist hub you could not schedule these cuts in the afternoon or morning defy understanding. And certainly, this is compounded and particularly egregious over these crucial few weeks. 

Some of Galle’s restaurants and shops normally attract people from kilometres away from Colombo on a regular basis. But a darkened expanse is a deterrent. And even if the cricketers keep monastically to their hotels during the Test Match, in addition to everyone else who would love to avail of these services, even the cricketers would doubtless prefer to look out onto the beautifully lit outlines of this World Heritage city instead of having to blog, “lights out!” 

What images do we actually want to have circumnavigating the globe? The ill-timed power cuts are a microcosm of the auto-pilot policy silliness that too often has us clutching defeat from the jaws of victory (even if they are only episodic, short-term victories). 

Shifting models

Looking at how to show ourselves in the best light, as we gear up for fresh arrivals we will have to migrate from the ‘one-night-stand’ model of tourism to romancing the tourist. 

On the earlier tour operator driven model, current visits to Sri Lanka involve ricocheting from one geography and tourist site to another with long uncomfortable drives and all too brief stopovers. When that is the paradigm, hotels never develop real service excellence, depth of cuisine, range of experiences or a personal bond that would stoke loyalty and produce true raving fans. 

It is also completely disconnected to how virtually all travel actually takes place. High end travellers who are not on adventure trips or a ‘grand tour’ wish to luxuriate, savour, sample and immerse. And if we opt to shift gear in that direction, it will liberate so many niche offerings and, for the niche traveller, it is always experiences and value, not price, which predominate. 

Here’s hoping

Today, around Lanka, with industry after industry on the reefs, with donors putting us through our paces, too much seems wretched, and despair drenched. 

And it may yet not be the bottom, as many people may feel it is. It may get worse; we may go lower, as we rally for a rebound and gather the reserves to do so. Real heroism today is telling the truth but facing the truth in a way that does not put any barriers to progress and rejuvenation.

And so, with all this laid out, ugly and incontrovertible, the task for those who are stunned by the baldness of the horror we have enabled our leaders to inflict on us, paralysed by the bleakness of the view, is to figure out how to move forward anyway. Perhaps we even have to uplift flagging political leadership through our own resolve and enterprise. 

Because while it is incumbent on us to digest the scope and breadth of the badness, it is equally our responsibility not to despair.

On a World War II battlefield, a British General mused, “What does it mean, the opposing obligation of honouring the genuine feeling of being shattered, while gathering up what remains, even generating fresh resolve to work harder?” And today, to work smarter, much smarter.

It means doing the thing that people have always done on the arduous path to greater justice: Find the way to hope, not as feel-good anaesthetic but as tactical necessity, as a rung on a ladder to better strategies and saner human reflexes.

The prison abolitionist Mariame Kaba reminds us that “hope is a discipline.” It is also a political strategy when there are real “must win battles” to advance and a survival mechanism that mobilises us all to do our best and look after each other, including those precious tourists. How we “feel” is secondary. We lavish each day with our best. And we live to improve the present and lay the groundwork for the future, but psychologically and emotionally, in day-tight compartments.

I have been asked, “How can we keep going when the progress accumulated over our lifetimes has been reversed?” But we go forward because that progress was made against forces that will never stop trying to reverse it. And we go forward because we must hand over something better to those who follow. Having enjoyed the fruits of less anguished times, we cannot now flee the battlefield and let others reap the aftermath.

We can package the appeal of Lanka so the world can experience its tonic and allow us to move forward on the wings of that enthusiasm. And we can ensure there is real “authenticity” on offer and not “just” packaging. 

The failure to communicate is a failure of our leaders, many of whom came of age politically in a period of temporary victories that they seemed to believe — due to naïveté or wilful blindness — would continue to move in one expansive direction without having to be safeguarded. 

It is no accident that many who brought us to this, got punched drunk on power, and doled out favours by way of chloroform. They had moved into classes of power and privilege, where they could remain insulated from the erosions that have been grinding away this whole time, right under their noses.

This stubborn belief in a kind of Forever Progress has undergirded a political message that there was nothing to worry about. It has prevented a proper understanding of this country’s history, of an overpriced government, runaway debt, undeveloped export sector, staying with commodities rather than challenging ourselves towards high value-added in so many sectors. And now it is the shattering of this belief, realising how we’ve squandered time and opportunity, that pulls people toward despair.

But despair is poison. It deadens people when the most important thing they can do is proceed with more drive and force and openness than they have had before. We need to raise our standards. We need to gather and mine data. We need to follow through and deliver. 

To be as clear as humanly possible: Insisting on hope does not equal a call to dumb cheer, empty sloganeering, and baseless optimism. That is the kind of disregard for reality that landed us here. Fatuous overconfidence is what permitted those in power to tell those with their hair on fire that their fear was misplaced, extreme and overdramatic. 

So let’s not waste this decimating crisis. And let’s communicate clearly to entice everyone here we can, to experience the treasures here. 

And in managing a recovering society on the ground, people who have been staring at these realities can finally build better networks and mechanisms. We have activists out there, and leaders who are building real corporate assets, we have those running clinics and funds and have experience helping people to get the care they need when that care has been denied and obstructed by the state. They have developed provisions for medical care, pioneered the delivery systems of IT capability, and hopefully will help us co-create the constitutional safeguards and laws that can underwrite progress. All such, require our support and money and energy.

Let us tell stories of Sri Lanka’s successes. And let’s prepare the ground for fresh ones. We have this lineage of fighting back against hard-won rights being regressed, fighting back against going backwards. It is important for us to be able to tell those stories much more broadly again. And we have to look in part to that ancestral wisdom to be able to find a path forward. This is the muscle memory of those who have never had the comfort that their rights would remain intact.

This country’s history has also been built on days like those we’ve been living through. Bad days. It has shown itself capable of reform. We’ve transcended them before. And if the collective will is harnessed, and we enrol the nation with honesty and dignity, its people — those willing to give their lives and every scrap of hope they could muster — will help reform it by the force of their will if they must. Surely, we have had enough of the alternative.

So we smile to welcome those travellers; they are a boon and a blessing and a prism for possibility. We don’t turn the lights out on them. We invite them to dive deeply into our culture. 

We also weep and mourn and rage and go forward with the will of those who came before, and those who have never stopped putting one foot in front of another, to some finer tomorrow, distant but always possible.

Tourism, yes, is a rung on this ladder. Let’s safeguard it and keep climbing.

(The writer is the founder and CEO of EPL Global and founder of Sensei Lanka, a global consultant with over 30 years strategic leadership experience and now, since March 2020, a globally recognised COVID researcher and commentator.)