Sunday Times - March 31, 2006
It's a filthy job, but somebody has to do it.
Every two years my co-author and I hit the road for two months to update the Lonely Planet guide to Scotland, travelling all over the country and visiting hundreds of tourist attractions, hotels, B&Bs, backpacker hostels, cafes, restaurants and bars. Sounds like a dream job, but it's actually bloody hard work. (Why does no one ever believe me when I say that?) It also provides a highly concentrated experience of the sharp end of the Scottish tourist industry.
Scotland offers some of the world's finest scenery, top tourist attractions and exhilarating outdoor activities, but how we treat our visitors - and how much we charge them for the pleasure, or otherwise - still leaves a little to be desired.
It's all very well for VisitScotland to spend millions on marketing campaigns to attract visitors to Scotland, but once they've spent a holiday here you've got to make them want to come back again. Recent tourism surveys show that, in general, visitors are impressed by Scotland, and would recommend it to friends and family as a place to go. But there's always a 'but'.
The three biggest 'buts' we come across again and again are prices, public transport and quality of service.
Guidebook writing is not an expense-account junket (we get a paid a flat fee, and then have to fund our travels out of our own pocket), and accepting freebies from hotels and restaurants - or anyone else - in return for a good write-up is a definite no-no (it's written into our contracts). And the first thing that hits you is that Scotland is a costly destination, especially so these days for American visitors who suffer from a poor exchange rate. (By the way, I should point out that Lonely Planet guides are no longer aimed solely at backpackers. Authors of country guides such as Scotland are encouraged to aim for a 40-40-20 split of budget, mid-range and top-end places.)
Everything here seems expensive - accommodation (you can expect to pay £40 to £80 for a double room in an average guest house in the Highlands); food and drink (if you want more than a bacon roll or a cheese sarnie, you're looking at £10 a head for lunch, twice that for dinner in a decent restaurant); public transport (Edinburgh to Fort William by train is almost £50 return - you could buy two return flights from London to Barcelona for that); petrol (the highest prices in Europe and almost three times the cost in the USA); and even admission fees (Edinburgh Castle, and several other popular castles in the Highlands, charge an eye-watering £10 a head).
The explosion of low-cost flights to dozens of European cities means that Scotland has to compete with lots of cheaper destinations. Looking at city breaks from London, for example, Edinburgh is now in direct competition with places such as Prague, an equally attractive capital city that has long since shrugged off its communist past and can now boast an exciting range of boutique hotels and gourmet restaurants with polite and professional service. We really need to look hard at the possibility of tax breaks and lower business rates to give Scottish tourism a realistic chance of bringing prices down.
One of the hardest parts of writing a UK-based guidebook is explaining our railway system and its Byzantine fare structure. Last year I booked a return ticket from Edinburgh to Huntingdon using the Internet. Having found that the cheapest return ticket available was £90, it was only through idle curiosity that I clicked on the option for single ticket fares, and found that I could buy two singles, for the same dates and times, for £19 each. What's that about, then?
And while we're on the subject of public transport, why does Edinburgh cling to the system where you have to buy a ticket - exact change only please - from the driver as you board the bus? How can any driver stick to a timetable when he or she has to dish out tickets to a queue of passengers frantically searching for loose change?
In cities from Prague to Toronto you can buy public transport tickets from vending machines, newspaper kiosks, tourist offices, hotel receptions and grocery shops. After you've boarded the tram - without bothering the driver - you validate the ticket in a little machine that stamps the time on it. You can then change from one tram to another, or from tram to bus to metro, as often as you like for 60 minutes from the time of validation. Plain clothes inspectors check tickets regularly, and the whole system runs like clockwork. Why can't we introduce a similar system here?
The third big 'but' of travelling in Scotland is our long tradition of service with a scowl - the waiters, receptionists and guest house owners who make Basil Fawlty seem like the maitre d' at the Ritz. And then there are the guest house owners who suffer from Creeping Sign Disease, which manifests itself in the form of little laminated signs knocked up on the home computer and stuck to every available surface - No Damp Towels On The Bed; No Eating In Your Room; Do Not Flush Toilet After 10pm
There are some extreme examples. In one hotel in the Outer Hebrides I was checked in by the hotel chef dressed in filthy whites with a cigarette dangling from his lip, while dense smoke wafted from the kitchen door. The windows in my room were rusted open, and a giant toilet roll dispenser in the bathroom prevented you from sitting upright on the toilet. (That'll be £40 for a single room, thank you.) And a Lonely Planet reader wrote to warn us about a guest house in the West Highlands where the landlord avoided contact with his guests as far as was humanly possible (after having taken payment in advance, of course), leaving Post-It notes explaining where to find breakfast, how to switch on the water heater, and where to leave the keys when you left.
Too many guest house owners and hotel and restaurant managers employ family members, local school kids and students at shoestring rates and chuck them in at the deep end with little or no training, leaving them to sink or swim at front of house while they sit in their offices wondering where to put the new trouser presses (complete with laminated sign - Please Do Not Use For Drying Clothes) so they can get an extra VisitScotland star.
Despite gradual improvements, poor levels of service remain a problem. A few years ago, we had to rely on a small army of young people from Australia, New Zealand and South Africa working in our hotels, bars and restaurants if we wanted service with a smile. Sadly, this foreign legion has not yet been replaced by a home guard of freshly trained Scottish talent, but by an influx of young people from Poland, Lithuania, Slovenia and other new EU member countries. Last summer almost every hotel and restaurant that I visited had at least one member of staff from central or eastern Europe. They are, for the most part, excellent - friendly, professional and polite, and most of them speak better English than I do - but most will be heading home in a year or two.
This lack of a home-grown service ethos seems to be a cultural thing. Perhaps as a legacy of the British class system, we tend to look down on people working at the coal face of tourism - waiters, bar-staff, hotel receptionists - as poorly paid, low-status employees. But these are the very people that tourists interact with several times a day, every day of their trip, and they are actually the most important cogs in the entire tourism machine. They are the ones we need to spend time and money on.
Fortunately, in the last few years various bodies in both the public and private sectors have begun to the address the question of poor service. The Scottish Executive has ploughed £3 million over two years into VisitScotland's quality assurance scheme, aimed specifically at the training and development of service staff. And a group of private individuals working in the Scottish tourism sector has set up an organisation called Pride and Passion (www.prideandpassion.net), whose objective is to raise levels of service through the informal sharing of information, tips and techniques among tourism businesses.
The good news is that it appears to be working - slowly, yes, but each time we hit the road things get a little better. It's still filthy work, but I'm happy to be the one to do it.
