Sometimes, you hear complaints about the lack of professionalism in this province’s tourism industry — about the way that standards, quality and the skills and training of tourism staff vary wildly, depending on which establishment you go to.
Three different bed and breakfasts will have three different levels of service and three different prices — and the ones that offer the best experience aren’t necessarily the ones with the best price, either.
It’s something that makes operators pull their hair out — they hear about the mistakes and miscues of others from their own patrons, and wonder just how the industry can guarantee a basic level of quality. It’s an organic thing, really; operators who figure out the right standards will stay in business in the long run, while eventually the under-equipped and the unprepared will fall by the wayside.
In the process, there’s always the fear that a critical number of tourists will visit once, have a bad experience and never come back again — and worse, that they’ll tell their friends and neighbours, who will then not even show up for that first visit.
Now, there are places that elevate tourism to a near art — try Niagara Falls on for size — where every single employee is drilled to wish you a good morning, even if you make eye contact for only a fraction of a second, even if you’re merely passing their establishment and not coming in.
It’s a ritualized, Kibuki-theatre type approach to tourism. The idea seems to be that, if you cross all the “t”s and dot every “i,” the world will keep beating a path to your door. (At least for as long as there is a gigantic natural attraction parked right there in the backyard, with millions of gallons of water plunging over a limestone cliff and generating its own small 24-7 fogbank.)
Downtown? There’s the uberkitschy Clifton Hill, a narrow, noisy street of arcades, wax museums and fright rides, and then there’s the commercialization of the Falls themselves — the all-too-familiar Maid of the Mist boat tours, the Imax film experience, the damp and dripping tunnels that bring you to small portals right out behind the Falls where you can watch tonnes and tonnes of water plunging in a white wall directly in front of you. It’s planned, it’s cheerful, it’s crowded, and you get the feeling that the city’s keenly aware of how valuable the tourism dollar is to its very existence.
But the other thing that tourism in Niagara Falls is, is relentlessly monopolistic, at least when it comes to price.
It’s a forest of hotels all clamouring for the best view, a zone of casino and bars and restaurants so concentrated that they can make their own rules.
Pull into a parking lot, and base rate for parking — even for an hour — is $25. The guy in the kiosk shrugs when you ask if there’s cheaper parking. “It’s $25 everywhere,” he says, and that’s something of a mantra in the downtown core.
Want to park in the hotel parking lot? Most places, $20 a day, even though it’s the same kind of asphalt everywhere.
It’s something to think about as you empty an everyday package of sugar into an ordinary coffee cup, stir the coffee with an absolutely average stainless steel flatware spoon — and then pay $5 for that straightforward cup of breakfast coffee. And pay the 18 per cent service charge that seems to be tacked onto everything everywhere, followed by other taxes and capped with the always-lovely HST.
It makes you miss a few rough edges here and there.
Sometimes, service here is too familiar, and sometimes you can’t help but wonder what kind of reaction some elements will get from tourists used to more formal and more standard accommodations.
I can remember one cabin on the Northern Peninsula in particular, a lovely spot but one where every sheet, pillowcase, towel and blanket in the two bedrooms came from a different set, a tangle of styles so unique you’d be hard-pressed to design it if you tried. The coffee mugs?
Clearly, someone had turned 50 and someone else had shopped at Irving — every completely different mug clearly had its own story attached.
But the price? The price was superb, the cabin was quiet and clean, and the breathtaking presence of the Northern Peninsula was right there outside the door.
Sure, let’s professionalize the tourism industry in this province — to a point.
Let’s make sure we always offer at least the basics that tourists want — and maybe keep the idea of charging the maximum for everything at an arm’s length.
Sometimes, the perfect tourism industry model can just be the wrong thing to be.
Russell Wangersky is the editorial page editor of The Telegram. He can be reached by email at rwanger@thetelegram.com
