Any country is the sum of its parts and the whole is weakened when any of those parts are experiencing difficulty.

Because Bermuda has been very successful for a long time and because most Bermudians are now accustomed to a lifestyle which only a very small number of the world's people enjoy, we have a tendency to take continued success for granted.

The truth is that success is not our right and has to be earned and maintained. We should never assume that past success indicates continued success. Much of Bermuda's past success was built on caring and on hard work.

We were good to our visitors but, as the numbers grew and our prosperity grew, it became more difficult. Too often we looked on visitors as an inconvenience.

It may be that continued success has made us a bit careless and a bit lazy.

Bermudians too often forget that every time we litter the street or throw bottles overboard or mock our admirable sign laws or plunder wrecks or obscure a view or build another ugly building or blast a radio or honk our horn or curse in public, we take something away from our own and the visitor's enjoyment of Bermuda.

Bermuda's tourist industry is now in constant decline. We were the best. We virtually invented island tourism. Our success was unparalleled. But we began to take that success for granted. We thought that this was, after all, beautiful Bermuda, the best of the islands, and visitors would continue to come no matter what we provided, no matter what we charged and no matter how we treated them.

At the same time new and more exotic resorts opened and Bermuda began to cater to visitors who were looking for certainty in their vacation. They wanted a safe and comfortable destination which was close to the United States and both reliable and affordable.

A vacation is a total package. It starts with the airport or dock arrival, where we seldom even bother to say "Welcome to Bermuda'' and ends with the last glimpse of land. In between it depends on the quality of accommodation and the value of that accommodation for the price paid. Too often in Bermuda we allowed the accommodation to deteriorate as the price rose and thus we were not so reliable or so affordable.

We also became less safe as crimes against visitors increased with beach thefts, break-ins at vacation accommodation and handbag snatches.

A vacation package includes the treatment visitors receive from those people with whom they come in contact. The success of that treatment depends on both efficiency and attitude. While the great majority of Bermudians are helpful and friendly, it only takes one bad experience to create a very sour vacation.

But there is more involved here. There is also Bermuda's general ambiance and the convenience of visitors. As examples, visitors used to thoroughly enjoy their moped rides. They were relatively inexpensive and provided a freedom to roam which was enjoyable. Then we clogged the roads with noisy and often recklessly operated vehicles, endangering the visitors and killing their enjoyment, and them, and failed to provide alternative transportation.

We virtually gave up "island'' entertainment in favour of smutty comics and "feathered'' girls in Vegas style revues, the staples of mainland entertainment. We also herded people inside air conditioned rooms which are much the same the world over and only recently have begun to move back outside.

As a result, Bermuda's visitor structure is now somewhat tired and rather old and old-fashioned. The peace is eroded, the environment is less attractive and you might get robbed. But still the prices go up.

The result is that Bermuda needs to revitalise its tourism but we need to understand that all the physical plant in the world will be of no benefit if we do not also spruce up our attitude toward visitors.