visitor who had managed to get in her way at a Front Street stop light. We have to wonder if that driver has any idea how much of her income is derived from visitors. She was not, of course, verbally abusing one visitor but also his friends and relatives and, probably, his travel agent who will all be told the story.

That is only one example of the way some visitors get treated in Bermuda at a time when we are all aware of poor arrival figures.

Too often Bermudians blame troubled tourism on outside factors. It's the airfares. Americans are staying home. With air travel, Bermuda is now too close to the United States.

The truth is that most of our problems are internal. Other resorts, including our direct competition, are doing well. Americans are travelling, they are just uncertain about coming to Bermuda.

The word is out that Bermuda is expensive, not as good as it once was, and that you can have your holiday disrupted. That is the problem no matter what excuses we make. Why can't we settle down, accept the blame and admit that if we have not killed the goose that laid the golden egg, we have done a pretty good job of wounding that goose.

Our general prices are high for visitors from North America. Let's accept that and it is easy to agree that the great majority of our visitors come from North America. It is not the prices themselves that concern visitors so much as their impression that they are gouged at every turn.

What can we do about these prices? There is no easy solution. However we should start with the things about which visitors openly complain. We should remove the hotel room tax and impose the tax amounts on locals in such a way that they cannot be passed on to visitors.

We should probably do the same thing with departure taxes even though we have now hidden that tax in the cost of a ticket at a time when we complain that airfares are too high. It would probably be fair enough to continue to impose departure taxes on local residents.

We must take a very hard look at the 15 percent automatic gratuity. Most visitors find it excessive and they know very well that it is not for their convenience.

Lower the cost of transportation for visitors by allowing hotels to run courtesy buses from the Airport, to Hamilton and to the beach. North American visitors are accustomed to courtesy buses at home. Many of our visitors are also well aware that they can rent a car at home for the price per day that they are charged in Bermuda for mopeds.

There needs to be a dialogue towards finding ways not to take our own disputes out on our visitors. Those disputes can have the same effect as the woman taxi driver shouting obscenities. Too often our internal disputes, especially our labour disputes, disrupt the visitors' expensive holidays. They expect a vacation to be trouble free and we should do our very best to ensure that. Why are we so careless as to bite the hands that feed us?