#BTEditorial – More in the mortar than on the pestle

We do not for a moment dispute the very sobering process by which the owners and management of Chaps restaurants arrived at the decision of their closure.

Curiously, the mere mention of the word “taxes” has acted with dog-whistle effectiveness on the administration, such that ministers of the Crown immediately engaged in talks with the view to solving, presumably, the problem facing their viability.

But this cataclysmic event for the closure of three high-end restaurants and the loss of 150-odd jobs at the very height of the winter tourist season can only be viewed as such.

But inadvertently, these closures raise difficult, sobering questions and sound other alarms about the state of our tourism product as we embark on the second decade of the 21st century.

As far back as 1992, the tourism expert, Dr Auliana Poon noted that Barbados had become what had been described as a mature destination. It had, for want of a euphemism, maxed out its potential among its core demographic of older, more financially secure clients, looking to be pampered as they sun themselves during the winter months on cliched, white sand beaches

Then, as now, experts like Dr Poon warned that tourists would be seeking experiences, not mere exposure to sunlight, time and time again.

We were warned to evolve our product into a multifaceted melting pot of cuisine, heritage, leisure and sport, conventions and good old Barbadian hospitality.

But all the while, as we were racking up visitor arrivals in the hundreds of thousands, engaging in self-congratulatory rhetoric loosely summed up as “the more the merrier we will be”, the truth is that we were slowly advancing towards the mass-market end of the tourism spectrum: those who come in droves but pinch pennies as they spend, those people who want to be able to say: “I did Barbados”. They are not so much interested in experiences as in the experience of being here without having to pay too much for it.

And administration after administration, hunting airlift and hotel rooms, got sucked into a vortex of mass marketring, all-inclusive resorts, so-called packages, and the bundling of services to be sold in bulk to our major source markets.

And now, we regret to say, the chickens have come home to roost.

Almost immediately after coming to office, tourism minister Kerrie Symmonds noted the precipitous decline in visitor dollar spend levels even as record after record tumbled in both cruise ship and airplane arrivals.

For too long we have paid lip service to these additional niches. For example, we sought and received the coveted designation by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site for “Historic Bridgetown” – even one by one we tore down Georgian-era houses, mostly owned by the Government of Barbados. Even the projects that seek to revitalise Bridgetown have little to do with the restoration of old buildings and historic sites.

We also, however, cannot dispute the politically savvy move of blaming the closures on the deafness of an administration known for obsessive attention to image-building and optics.

That the restaurant took on new hires mere days before the decision to close – which bear all the hallmarks of timing, coordination and planning – smacks of an anti-worker experience more apt for the sugar plantations of 1950 than a service industry of 2020.

Our hearts go out to the 149 families and individuals whose lives have been turned upside-down by the closures.

But we also suggest that there is more in the proverbial mortar than on the pestle.

We hope for a swift resolution of the problems facing the Chaps restaurants but Barbados must begin to ask whether our continued obedience to the dictates of a singularly important industry is in the long-term, best health of the nation.