House of Assembly on Wednesday was literally bursting with good news for Bermuda. As Mr. Dodwell told the House, "things are happening''.

Any resort benefits from new or extensively revamped vacation properties. One of the main reasons put forward for amalgamating the properties at the South Shore, Warwick, Ritz Carlton site was that a new top hotel would set a high standard and attract visitors who like to visit the most recent hotels. Now there seems to be a real chance that there will be a new resort on that site.

When you add to that the proposed new business oriented hotel on Church Street and Par-la-Ville Road, a revamped Club Med under a new management with a record of success and the highly innovative and exciting plans for Daniel's Head in Sandys Parish you have a good spread of new visitor facilities over the entire Island. We cannot recall any other time in Bermuda when there were so many new visitor property developments all at once.

Huge sums of money are also being spent at Elbow Beach. Whether or not there are plans to turn that into a "gated community'' resort denying access to Bermudians and visitors not staying there, we do not know. However every hotel has to be licensed and we doubt that many Bermudians would be happy with being excluded from a major resort. It happened once before at Club Med despite warnings from this newspaper that it would happen, and many Bermudians were not happy. Aside from the exclusion, a problem is caused because visitors to the resort are encouraged to treat that resort and not the whole of Bermuda as their destination.

Aside from actual changes in hotel properties, Mr. Dodwell has pointed out that a review of the airline industry as it serves Bermuda will be made public shortly and there is a committee looking at the dissatisfaction visitors have over entertainment in the hotels. The committee is looking at what the customer wants, what Bermuda provided in the past and plans for the future.

Figures have shown that only 32 percent of visitors were satisfied with Bermuda's nightlife. Mr. Dodwell has said we have to have entertainment that will make visitors happy and he is correct because that is true for any holiday destination.

We can bring all the people to Bermuda we can possibly attract but if they are unhappy or dissatisfied once they get here, then Bermuda has lost. To that end hotel employees are being involved in setting standards for the hotels and a study is being conducted on the attitude of Bermudians to tourism. This is all part of the effort to get everyone in Bermuda involved in making tourism work.

Mr. Dodwell says we have got to be bold, different and innovative and we have got to be able to change. The old ways of attracting people to a beautiful Island which is close to the United States and has friendly people are no longer enough. Today we have to learn to get together and give people what they want.

We think the tourism picture is now very exciting and that Bermuda is on its way to a whole new future as a vacation island.