Venezuelan tourism, a Cinderella who can not find a Prince...

<a href=www.vheadline.com>venezuela's Electronic News Posted: Wednesday, May 14, 2003 By: Gustavo Coronel

VHeadline.com commentarist Gustavo Coronel writes: Caracas' most famous landmark and an obligatory tourist stop for many years was the main square, Plaza Bolivar, originally called Plaza Mayor. It dates back to 1567, when Diego de Lozada, founder of the city personally marked it out. Today no tourists go there for two main reasons: 1. There are no tourists to speak of, and, 2. the square has been taken over by vandals, (allegedly) paid by Chavista Mayor Bernal, to assail any passer by who looks prosperous.

For the last 20 years now, Venezuelan tourism has been a Cinderella unsuccessfully looking for a Prince. Dozens of tourist hotels have been repossessed by the government or simply gone broke on their own.

As we go back those 20 years we can remember hearing then the same phrases, almost the same words, we now hear. No tourism "Czar" has ever spoken of what he, she is doing but of what they will do....

Venezuelan tourism has no present, only a future...

At times it seemed as if tourism would finally take off ... from 1988 to 1991 the volume of tourists coming into Venezuela went from 380,000 to almost 600,000 ... everybody was dancing a jig. But then, in 1992, Chavez and his comrades staged two bloody coups which produced almost 200 deaths, one in February, the other in November.

Not surprisingly, in 1993 the amount of tourists went down to 300,000 (data from Business Venezuela, December 1994). In 1994 a new tourist "Czar" came in and given cabinet rank ... this man, Herman Luis Soriano, listed ten main obstacles to the development of tourism in the country, as follows:

• Insufficient promotion abroad;
• Low priority assigned by the government to the sector;
• Insufficient financial resources allotted;
• Lack of a service mentality among Venezuelans;
• Insecurity;
• Poor airline connections to main tourist destinations;
• Confusing government regulations;
• Bureaucratic red tape and exchange controls;
• Slow privatization programs and political turmoil...

He went on to say that this would now change...

Ten years later, the obstacles identified by Soriano are still there, and no less than ten other Czars have come after him ... to say the same things. Some of these "Czars," like Maria Eugenia Loriente, have been extremely incompetent, and none have received much support from the rest of the government.

Four years ago, President Chavez unveiled his Strategic Plan for the development of tourism. In this plan he predicted that, by 2002, Venezuela would be receiving 1.5 million visitors. Only 150,000, 10% of the predicted visitors, accepted the invitation ... this was an amount four times lower than 20 years before!

• During these four years tourist hotel occupation has dropped about 60%, from a yearly average of 55% in 1999 to a dismal 22% by 2002.

Why this failure?

Although Venezuela is, in theory, a far superior destination than many others in the region ... due to its natural beauty and diversity of attractions, from waterfalls to jungle, from exotic fauna to spectacular beaches, from great restaurants to snow-capped mountains ... it is in practice perceived by potential visitors as of difficult access, dangerous and unfriendly.

Many of these perceptions are too harsh, but they nevertheless dominate the decision making of many tourists ... and many of those who come to us, frankly, do so because they have no other alternative. However, when they finally make it here, they are almost always favorably impressed.

This was my personal experience for the almost three years I spent as top executive of a company owning a big Venezuelan tourist resort. Inside our doors everything was clean and in good working order. Our staff was polite and smiling. The word "no" had been eliminated from their vocabulary ... they were "aggressively friendly," a motto which I concocted.

• However, outside our doors we could not control the filth on the sidewalks, the potholes in the road, the attacks of petty thieves, the harassment of buhoneros...

There are plenty of good, hard-working people in the private sector trying to make Venezuela a better tourist destination. The government, as always, is very indifferent, very inept, frequently corrupt...

The hard-working private sector has to swim in a tank of sharks...

And so ... year in and year out ... while sharks and humans wearily swim together, tourists hesitate to come to us and Cinderella keeps waiting for her Prince ... a bit more wrinkled now (she, not the Prince)...

Gustavo Coronel is the founder and president of Agrupacion Pro Calidad de Vida (The Pro-Quality of Life Alliance), a Caracas-based organization devoted to fighting corruption and the promotion of civic education in Latin America, primarily Venezuela. A member of the first board of directors (1975-1979) of Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), following nationalization of Venezuela's oil industry, Coronel has worked in the oil industry for 28 years in the United States, Holland, Indonesia, Algiers and in Venezuela. He is a Distinguished alumnus of the University of Tulsa (USA) where he was a Trustee from 1987 to 1999. Coronel led the Hydrocarbons Division of the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) in Washington DC for 5 years. The author of three books and many articles on Venezuela ("Curbing Corruption in Venezuela." Journal of Democracy, Vol. 7, No. 3, July, 1996, pp. 157-163), he is a fellow of Harvard University and a member of the Harvard faculty from 1981 to 1983.  In 1998, he was presidential election campaign manager for Henrique Salas Romer and now lives in retirement on the Caribbean island of Margarita where he runs a leading Hotel-Resort.  You may contact Gustavo Coronel at email gustavo@vheadline.com