for has long since passed. That's just one of the conclusions drawn by the Monitor Company about tourism. Henry Adderley looks at what Monitor found was wrong with tourism -- and how it says Bermuda can put it right.

Bermuda's tourism industry is failing to satisfy either its visitors or its own needs.

And Bermudians are failing to work together to turn the situation around.

Those are the stark conclusions of a group of consultants hired to develop a long term strategy to revitalise the tourism industry -- the Island's major employer.

The Monitor Company has just completed the first phase of its work -- a four-month study of what the Island provides and the feelings of US travel agents and households about Bermuda as a tourist destination.

Project director Joseph Babiec told The Royal Gazette earlier this week that one clear point of consensus had emerged.

"Bermuda's tourism industry, the foundation of the Island's economy, is not delivering benefits either to Bermuda's visitors or to Bermuda,'' he said.

Visitors were spending 94 percent as much per person as they did ten years ago, but were coming in smaller numbers and staying for fewer nights.

Meanwhile, only some of the Island's businesses demonstrated the complexity and efficiency required to deliver the elements of a richer experience for the visitor at the price they were already being charged.

Meanwhile, fewer Bermudians believed tourism was an attractive long-term career and viewed it more as part-time employment rather than a true profession.

Part of the reason behind how Bermuda's situation developed, said Mr. Babiec, was the international competitive environment.

Vacation travel was less of a luxury and more a part of people's lifestyles.

As more people took vacations, those vacations became increasingly different from one another.

At the same time, communication and transportation had improved to allow people to find out more about destinations and travel to them.

The most successful destinations were aggressively investing in information technology, customer learning and human capital development to improve their productivity, he added, because the new trends "are forcing destinations and companies to make more complex choices, to learn and to raise productivity at a faster rate''.

This, Mr. Babiec said, was not being done in Bermuda.

Research showed Bermudians seemed to be aware of these trends in the travel industry but were not making the choices necessary to take advantage of them.

Bermuda needed to emphasise complex, customised visitor experiences and was not doing so. Instead it was offering simple experiences on a broad scale.

The Island could not achieve competitiveness in the tourism arena using basic, imitable advantages like tax incentives, he warned, although this was the focus of most tourism discussion.

Businesses had to make clear choices to either provide premium services or low-cost average quality services as confusion was leaving many businesses stuck in the middle.

They were also tending to be more sensitive to the domestic market instead of the international market when making decisions.

Meanwhile overall industry productivity was low as few companies and institutions had reinvented their services or learned about their customers' needs.

These needs were shown from research conducted overseas to increase understanding of US travel trends and visitor needs.

This included a survey of 675 US households interested in vacations in one of the following four categories: quick break holidays; family bonding trips; romantic getaways; and water activity orientated holidays.

US-based travel agents were also interviewed to gather their impressions of Bermuda and its competition.

Mr. Babiec said patterns like low productivity and poor choices were entrenched in tourism and explained why it was yielding unsatisfactory results.

They were further compounded by: The fact Bermudian firms were unwilling to share information; Regulations were impeding innovation and distracting attention away from "customer learning''; and Programmes to develop human capital were ineffective and not all of Bermuda's travel partners overseas had strategies aligned with Bermuda's goals.

This created two long term results. One was that Bermuda's tourism industry would not evolve naturally toward the complex, customised experiences necessary to support a high standard of living.

It also meant that unclear choices and ineffective mechanisms were jeopardising the ability of Bermudian firms to develop the only sustainable competitive advantages -- highly skilled human capital and the necessary insights to guide their actions.

There were three reasons why Bermuda was not addressing these issues and acting on its own despite recognising them.

These were the invisible barriers of complexity, defensiveness and a lack of shared vision about what caused competitiveness, said Mr. Babiec.

The challenges facing tourism involved many factors which influenced one another, making the discussions about them complex, he continued.

However, the solutions proposed to resolve them only tackled one area of the problem and assumed the others would improve as a result but this was not the case.

Cooperative solutions -- which were challenging to construct and implement -- were required for these problems.

Tremendous defensiveness was unleashed when tourism was discussed on the Island, he noted, resulting in lack of trust and frustration.

This made it difficult to achieve change as it impeded the ability to have the complex discussions and joining of forces necessary to resolve the problems.

But when cooperative solutions to the complex problems were attempted, continued Mr. Babiec, those involved often started from very different assumptions about what contributed to sustainable competitiveness.

"Competitive advantage thinking'', which recognises that wealth is potentially infinite and that win-win solutions are possible if groups cooperate, needed to become the basis of these discussions about competitiveness and productivity were attempted in the future.

Mr. Babiec said Monitor would be taking the discussion to various groups and the community as a whole now in the form of 12 "categories of action''.

The point now was not to assign blame for the challenges facing tourism but to build a consensus on the industry's priorities and establish the roles all would play in addressing them, he said.

Trust also had to be restored between these groups as they will have to cooperate to produce change.

Mr. Babiec said Monitor was hoping a lasting vision for the Island's tourism industry could be formed around the following points.

Bermuda needed to define and make its moral purpose of having a higher standard of living for the average Bermudian more explicit, he said.

The Island had to cease being overdependent on its basic advantages of location, physical beauty and traditional brand name, he continued, while realising that its future wealth was based on insight, sophisticated human capital, investing in complex advantages and cultural attitudes which focused on embracing competition, learning, trust and cooperation.

And it had to understand that economic growth and social equality were mutually reinforcing rather than contradictory and that competitiveness was productivity and productivity was where Bermuda chose to compete and how it chose to compete.

Meanwhile Government had to do everything it could to assist the private sector except impede competition while the private sector had to assume responsibility for competitiveness in tourism through investments in learning, leadership, customer knowledge and product enhancement.

NEW STRATEGIES -- Joseph Babiec `An audit of Bermuda's large hotels suggests that an average of as little as nine percent of their revenue comes from the value added services which signal a rich guest experience such as spas and business centres.' `Few restaurants feature distinctive Bermudian dishes; however, many consumers responded in our survey that they highly value local cuisine when they dine on travel.'