Jennifer Carnegie urged the government to release its new tourism strategy to ensure that Jersey was ready to compete for visitors once the current health crisis was over.
‘The fear that [some members] have now is that, when we get control of the virus around the world, people are going to want to travel and they are not necessarily going to want to stay in Jersey but are going to holiday in all the places they visit around the world. If we can’t attract a good number of visitors back, the hotel industry could be worse off even than it’s been this year. How long that sector is going to take to recover depends how hard we work to attract tourism back into the Island,’ she said.
Mrs Carnegie said that such a plan was dependent both on maximising Jersey’s competitive advantages – as a destination easy and cost-effective to get to with an appealing visitor offering – and on making sure that the virus was under control to generate confidence.
And she warned that, without such a co-ordinated effort, the current restrictions, which have seen all establishments with liquor licences closed down until at least January, could provide a stark warning of what might otherwise be to come.
‘At the moment we’re experiencing what it’s like to have next-to-no hospitality and it’s awful, it’s dull, it’s difficult to find places to meet and it forces people not to socialise which, of course, is exactly the point. But what would happen if it was always like that?
‘What if these little businesses – these hotels and fabulous restaurants we have – disappeared entirely and it was like this all the time? Jersey wouldn’t be the place we know. We wouldn’t be able to attract the talent here; the financial services businesses we rely on so heavily wouldn’t necessary want to come here and we wouldn’t have a great deal to offer tourists outside the natural landscape, so I think that’s a huge area of concern,’ Mrs Carnegie said.
However, in spite of the challenges facing hospitality and tourism, Chamber’s president was generally upbeat about the future if government provided a lead.
‘If we have a coherent plan, I think we can recover fairly quickly. Members are nervous about the amount of debt we are taking on and about tax hikes but we’ve got a track record of being pretty prudent so, as long as we continue that way and get control of the spending that’s going on, and the government delivers on the efficiencies it says it will, I’m optimistic,’ she said.
lMrs Carnegie is the subject of this week’s Saturday interview on pages 10 and 11.
