Thanks for the pretty pamphlet, but...ANSWER YOUR PHONE!!!

A couple of weeks ago, the FITUR trade fair was held in Madrid. If you're lucky enough to have spent the last ten years living in an abandoned village somewhere, and don't know what FITUR is, it's probably enough to say that FITUR is probably Spain's largest tourism trade fair, if not Europe's. Not being much for crowds, I'm not usually wild about the idea of getting into a situation that's packed with people, and at 1:20 in the morning of Friday, February 1st, I made the executive decision not to go. I couldn't find the file number for my ticket. I'd spent quite a while fighting with (and, to be honest, yelling at) my computer printer; and when I started to weep from sheer exhaustion from the effort of changing languages in Word for Windows' grammar checked, I looked at the computer and thought: Why the hell am I doing this to myself, when I know that I'm going to get claustrophobic and irritated, and, in the end, I'm not going to get what I want?

This blog entry is not meant to be a criticism of FITUR. Obviously, if you're the president of multi-million-dollar travel company, FITUR gives you a great opportunity to meet and work with a decent number of people in a protracted time frame. But one also has to accept the event for what it is: It moves money in the world of tourism. And a person who is in charge of a project which doesn't represent lots and lots of money, someone who represents a project which is much more modest, probably doesn't have the chance to connect with people and be able to work with the necessary tourism authorities. Why should they pay attention to you if if your project isn't going to bring in millions of Euros? Maybe you'll get lucky and come across someone who's got the conviction that it's worth developing green tourism initiatives. Or maybe you won't. And if you aren't lucky, what do you have, in the end?

A couple of years back, I had the opportunity to be a participant in a conference on tourism development in the town of Priego de Córdoba, in Andalusia. I'd already given a speech the previous summer at Estepona's City of Journalism summer programme; I'd been asked to do a presentation on marketing to an English-speaking clientele, and I called it like I saw it (after all, isn't that the reason they invite you to these things?)

I didn't offer criticism as much as I tried to offer a cross-cultural assessment of the difference between domestic tourism and tourism that comes from other countries - mostly small things like the paying for quality translations (don't get a translation from the cousin of the guy whose brother's step-sister owns the town bar)...don't assume that "quality tourism" has to always mean "rich tourists" (why is it that when towns announce "quality tourism" initiatives, it almost always involves a golf course? Hasn't anyone noticed that there's a drought in this country?)...take care of the small details (answer your e-mails in a 24-hour period)...invest the money to do a good job of the existing infrastructure...not necessarily expensive or time-consuming things; just things that show that you give enough of a damn to do things properly.

I spent a lot of time thinking about that presentation this morning, as I spent most of the morning trying to get ahold of the authorities in towns whose names, as "Don Quijote" says, I do not care to remember. Thank God I have a flat rate phone plans where all national calls are free, because I have the feeling I'm going to be spending a LOT more time working the phones in the next couple of weeks.

To cite but one example: I sent an e-mail to the tourist board of one province back at the beginning of January, and finally heard from them on Monday. "Call this number," was the answer in the e-mail. I call the number. "No, ma'am," they told me, "we handle all queries by e-mail. You need to send us an e-mail with your query."

See what I mean?