“Final Call” – Great Book, Rubbish Ending

This is a book that everyone in the travel industry should read. It’s as good and as iconoclastic as “No Logo”, the seminal, best selling Naomi Klein exposee.

Not only is “Final Call” by Leo Hickman informative, well researched and well written, but also, let’s face it, if you gain your sustenance from the travel industry you should know how your endeavours affect other people. Final Call will give you the goods and dish you the dirt.

So buy it and read it, if you’re any thinking sort of travel industry person, you won’t want to put it down.

Just one thing, though – I have no difficulty with Leo’s text and his interviews, nor his story – which is great. But I do take issue with his conclusions. In particular, that a lottery for tourist visas could ever be a good idea.

Leo has meticulously researched his subject and reports assiduously. He visits Dubai, Kerala, Benidorm, Thailand, China, Miami, Mexico, Costa Rica, Ibiza and Estonia during the course of his investigations. His subjects include “The Hippy Trail”, cruising, sex tourism, ecotourism, golf courses, stag and hen weekends and airline emissions. He interviews dozens of people from the bosses of luxury hotel groups to impoverished guides. Leo’s style and commitment inform his writing – the format and content delivers a gripping read.

If you want to know (and everybody should) how tourism affects destinations, “Final Call” will tell you. It is simply a revelation.

Unfortunately, though, Leo falls at the last hurdle. Up in the air, half way across, he decides that describing the problem (which he’s extremely good at) is not quite enough. For better or worse, he changes tack and decides to give us some answers too. Answers, eh?

One of the (very few) issues that Leo does not cover fully is the responsibility that consultants have for tourism today. They are always educated up to the eyeballs, usually poliically correct and well meaning. But they travel with a suitcase full of pet tourism answers, looking for the tourism problems they fit.

Because their employers (the World Bank, the European Union, amongst many others) want answers, usually in the form of a TMP (Tourism Masterplan).

If you’ve read as many TMP’s as I have and seen the ensuing developments, you’ll know two things for sure: The first is that they never work, the second is that the fashionable answers they espouse often do more harm than good.

Like lotteries, tourism taxes, tourism-specific zones all answers the global tourism industry hasn’t quite got questions that fit.

Valere Tjolle