LONDON, Paris and Loch Ness. It has a certain ring to it and illustrates the commendably high level of ambition being shown by tourism group Destination Loch Ness (DLN).
The three locations are being visited by six politicians from the Chinese city of Benxi on a tour aimed at building tourism links with their home province, which is home to 44 million people and offers a vast new customer base for our hospitality sector.
They flew into Inverness from London yesterday for a 24-hour stay which included a haggis lunch, a visit to Urquhart Castle, a trip on Loch Ness and ended with a reception at the Town House. It represents a return visit after representatives from the Inverness area broke the ice with a trip to Benxi in 2008. Since then we have been through a recession but China’s economy continues to expand and more Chinese are looking to spend their new wealth on trips abroad. Thanks to the groundwork laid three years ago, Scotland has Approved Destination Status under Chinese government travel regulations and now that it is simpler for Chinese to obtain travel visas there are high hopes more groups and individuals will choose to holiday in the Highlands.
Links with China take time to build but DLN appears to have gained the trust of key individuals. With Inverness Airport’s new direct link with Schiphol, which in turn has flights to and from China, the infrastructure is also slowly taking shape.
But all this good work will come to nothing if we do not provide the high levels of quality and hospitality that the well-heeled Chinese, who spend an average £5000 each on holiday, expect. Stories of outrageous prices being charged for rooms during this summer’s Scottish Open at Castle Stuart suggests that some of our hotels still do not get it — rip customers off and they will not return. And in these days of the internet word spreads quickly. Do that to the Chinese and we will kill off what has the potential to be one of our most important future markets.
Yesterday the delegation was given a Mandarin language tour of the Loch Ness Visitor Centre. That kind of facility must become the norm if our tourism operators really want to be running all the way to the Benxi.
A consultation with hands tied
KILTARLITY as part of the Caithness, Sutherland and Ross and Cromarty constituency is the most glaring of several anomalies contained in the proposed new Westminster constituencies dreamt up by the Boundary Commission.
To be fair, it is the politicians’ fault for tying the commissioners’ hands with an instruction that all constituencies must have broadly similar numbers of voters. That may work in urban areas, where it produces a fairer spread of MPs, but in remote regions such as ours the advantages are far outweighed by the nonsense of having communities close to Inverness represented by an MP who may be based in Thurso. It increases people’s feelings of disconnection from politics and brings the whole process into disrepute.
A public consultation is under way but unless ministers relax the rules over voter numbers the best commissioners can offer will be to swap one anomaly for another.
As for choosing who from Danny Alexander, Charles Kennedy and John Thurso will contest the two seats, the Lib Dems have a difficult job. Might Mr Kennedy, who opposed entering into coalition with the Conservatives, be destined for the Lords? It would certainly solve a problem, but would he accept?
