Saturday, September 23, 2006 Carvajal: For lack of a culture of excellence By Orlando P. Carvajal
I liked what greeted me on my arrival the other day back from my father’s funeral in the US. Our lady governor said that the moves of concerned local governments to prepare Cebu to face with pride our Asean Summit guests need not be temporary.
She is urging Cebuanos to make the summit an occasion for a permanent change in our style of work and the start of the growth of a culture of excellence.
In a recent meeting that I attended to discuss how to promote Cebu as a tourist destination, the discussants all agreed that Cebu has more to offer in terms of tourist attractions than many of the other tourist destinations in Asia like Phuket in Thailand and Bali in Indonesia. Yet Cebu, although it is the number one tourist destination in the Philippines, still cannot hold a candle to Phuket and Bali in terms of tourist arrivals.
The reason for this is our poor delivery infrastructure, both physical and social.
We might have acceptable good holiday places or resorts but getting to them is an ordeal many tourists would rather forget. And how the locals treat them outside of their resort destinations is nightmarish in not a few instances
The ordeal starts with the arrival at the airport where tourists first encounter our substandard toilets. They do not smell clean because they are not clean.
They have liquid soap dispensers but no soap and they have paper towel or toilet paper dispensers but no paper towels or toilet paper.
It gets worse if the tour group is going far north or south. There’s no place where you can comfortably take a toilet break except in the Jollibee restaurants in Carcar and Bogo. If you have to go to the bathroom past these places, you have to do it behind a bush or in some stinking outhouse. For backpackers and low-budget tourists, the bus terminals and bus stops have atrociously dirty toilets.
Many of these tourists somehow get to tour Metro Cebu only to discover the Queen City of the South is messy, dirty and very forgettable as a tourist place.
What with people urinating, spitting, littering anywhere and driving any which way they can. What with taxis and stores overcharging tourists and thieves preying on them.
Cebu is a holiday island and historic too. But how can we improve tourist arrivals when those who come experience all the discomfort I mentioned above and leave us with a bad taste in the mouth and have no good word for us to tell to their friends?
This is a management problem. I’m sure Gov. Gwen Garcia has the political will to permanently change all this and push for excellence in her area of jurisdiction. But can we hear it from Mayor Tomas Osmeña too? Or will Cebu City become clean only because hizzoner insists so and not because it actually is?
