In spite of Tourism Director Judith Hall Bean’s denials, Government should be seriously concerned by the amount of staff turnover that has taken place in the Department of Tourism in the last few years.

Certainly, some turnover is to be expected in any organisation of substantive size. People are offered better jobs or improved benefits. Some decide that the job is not what they expected, or that they are not suited to it. Others retire.

But the Department of Tourism has now had three Directors in three years. Gary Phillips retired after putting in more than a decade as Director. Robert Calderon, who said the post was the culmination of his working career, resigned after a little more than a year. Now Mrs. Hall Bean has the job.

Within the department, the attrition has been even more severe. Not one of the Assistant Directors of Tourism who were in their posts when the Progressive Labour Party took power just three and a half years ago remains in the Department.

It could be argued that none of those people who were in the Department before the change of government, could claim, on the basis of tourism statistics, to have done an especially good job.

But things are even worse now and the institutional knowledge and contacts with travel agents, wholesalers, cruise lines, airlines, hoteliers and the like that has been lost as a result must be heavy and only time and experience will replace it.

Now the Assistant Director of Marketing, Cherie Whitter, has resigned to go to the private sector just weeks after the appointment of a new advertising agency tasked with rebranding the Island’s image. One wonders who will now liaise with the agency.

And the Ministry’s other major initiative, the African Diaspora Heritage Trail, has also just lost the person responsible for coordinating it five months into a 12-month contract and one month before a major conference.

It is true, as Mrs. Hall Bean pointed out, that three Assistant Directors of Marketing left between 1993 and 1998. But that fact only emphasises the need for a serious look to be taken at the Tourism Department. This is not a question of assigning blame (although there is no doubt that David Allen and David Dodwell could spend a few hours in the House of Assembly on it), it is a question of figuring out why the retention rate in Tourism is so poor and fixing it.

If the Tourism Department is going to continue to be responsible for leading the efforts to market Bermuda, then it cannot afford this kind of turnover.