mouth''. This is not an outside "expert'' who does not really know what he is talking about. This is not some kind of quickly done and frivolous analysis of Bermuda.

Mr. Bert Winterbottom is the man who knows. He has been consulting in Bermuda for many years and his company provides plans for tourist development for destinations world-wide. He has outlined some tough realities facing Bermuda's premier industry. We think that Bermuda will ignore his warnings at its peril.

The Premier's Commission on Competitiveness contains a strategic plan for tourism which has answers and which we are going to have to act on very seriously.

Mr. Winterbottom is clearly telling Bermuda that it is falling behind and has to get with the tourist times and get itself going again.

"No tourism destination in the world can rest on its laurels, without change, and expect to be in business a decade from now,'' he said.

Mr. Winterbottom appears to be deadly serious when he says that hotel visitors drive Bermuda's economy but Bermuda has been losing that primary market due to its own actions or oversights. He says Bermuda's tourism problems will not fix themselves and Bermuda requires a better product and more competitive cost structures.

This is not random criticism. Mr. Winterbottom showed his Chamber of Commerce audience a series of graphs and charts illustrating the upward trend in world travel and tourism. He also showed the 1987 to 1993 trends in Bermuda. All of the Bermuda trends are down. Surely that is warning enough for anyone.

We think there has been a tendency in Bermuda in recent years to use the recession as an excuse for problems in tourism. It is true that the recession was a problem but it was not the whole problem. Bermuda's tourism business has been showing its weaknesses since 1981.

We think Bermuda has had a tendency to take tourism for granted. There was a concerted effort in the years after the Second World War to create Bermuda as a successful quality resort. Bermudians achieved that and then became complacent. We have simply assumed that visitors would continue to fill our pockets no matter how they were treated and no matter what we charged. Too often we have charged top prices for old accommodation and uncertain service.

We have added to those problems by regularly disrupting expensive vacations with labour action.

It is notable that Mr. Winterbottom's definition of a world class resort destination includes a quality product, good value for money spent and "no strikes ever''. While Bermuda has many positive attributes it does seem to have forgotten those three categories.