Much com­men­da­tion should go to John Bell for his ex­cel­lent dis­ser­ta­tions on the ap­proach need­ed to turn around the ail­ing hos­pi­tal­i­ty in­dus­try. Gre­go­ry Aboud has al­so high­light­ed the need for im­prove­ments at our air­ports, par­tic­u­lar­ly ANR Robin­son in To­ba­go, and bet­ter sen­si­tiv­i­ty train­ing for our im­mi­gra­tion per­son­nel.

Bot­tom line though is that the en­tire coun­try needs to be re-ori­ent­ed to have a more wel­com­ing na­ture to all vis­i­tors and each oth­er for that mat­ter, and most im­por­tant­ly, we need to achieve the fol­low­ing ob­jec­tives, or at the very least, be se­ri­ous­ly work­ing to­wards them to have any chance at build­ing long-term suc­cess in the hos­pi­tal­i­ty in­dus­try.

1–achieve First World stan­dards in be­com­ing as lit­ter free as hu­man­ly pos­si­ble;

2–get rid of long-term road­side unau­tho­rised garbage dumps such as at the top of the Morne Co­coa Road. Fifty years ago, would you be­lieve, tourists were tak­en for scenic dri­ves on this road, which has now be­come a hell hole;

3–for God's sake, do some­thing about the crime sit­u­a­tion. Maybe hire over­seas pro­fes­sion­als to work along­side our lo­cal po­lice force to rid our coun­try of the gang scourge;

4–im­me­di­ate­ly halt the land-grab­bing go­ing on all over T&T. It is par­tic­u­lar­ly bad in the hilly ar­eas of Mar­aval, Mo­ka and Va­len­cia;

5–make the high­way pa­trol func­tion. Our road­ways are some of the most law­less places in T&T;

6–re-in­tro­duce com­mon sense in the ad­min­is­tra­tion of both cen­tral and lo­cal Gov­ern­ment. For ex­am­ple, on very busy two-lane roads like Sad­dle Road, Mar­aval, St Lu­cien Road, Diego Mar­tin etc, do not al­low de­liv­ery ve­hi­cles and garbage trucks to ser­vice these roads be­tween 6 am and 9 am and again from 3 pm � 6 pm. Un­til we en­force such com­mon sense rules to stop the every­day tyran­ny of the in­di­vid­ual over the ma­jor­i­ty, there will be no re­al re­turn to gen­uine ci­vil­i­ty;

7–Great­ly im­prove wa­ter dis­tri­b­u­tion, es­pe­cial­ly in To­ba­go, as no vis­i­tor will re­turn to a dry des­ti­na­tion;

8–lis­ten to tourism ex­perts like John Bell–in­deed hire him to be No 1 ad­vis­er to the tourism Min­is­ter;

9–mar­ket To­ba­go to Trinida­di­ans. I might go there if giv­en a rea­son to do so.

Some of you may ask what some of these above mea­sures have to do with tourism. Well, vis­i­tors al­ways like to be in a safe, se­cure and civilised en­vi­ron­ment and we are a long way from ci­vil­i­ty at this time.

Gre­go­ry Wight

Mar­aval