Fresh Thinking at Jamaica Tourist Board please!!

The adverts are back. They are enticing; seductive; alluring; beautiful. They display scenery only found in Jamaica and it is indeed Jamaica that the ads are promoting.
More specifically they invite the observer to come and visit Jamaica. There’s nothing wrong with that, surely, a beautiful advert?
But there is a lot wrong with it.
I stare at the advertising billboard as I await a train to London from a train platform in South London. It’s a big billboard and the advert is part of a London-wide campaign so it’s bound to have cost a lot of money - money from the Jamaica Tourist Board that the Government and people of Jamaica can ill-afford to waste. But this is a waste of money for sure.

That billboard fills the foreground of my vista and in the background the sky is grey. Yes, wouldn’t we all rather be there in sunny Jamaica than be here under the grey skies of England. But in the mid-distance there is a partly completed building just outside the grounds of the train station. This is an unfinished 4 storey apartment complex which would have been worth a few million pounds upon completion. It has on its grounds a 50 foot builder’s crane which hasn’t been used for the past 3 months. In fact there hasn’t been a single worker on this building site in the same 3 month period and the chances are that is not likely to change for the next year or so.
A year ago such apartment complexes were a sound investment for the average London citizen but now it’s all as though a dream. Now London is full of unfinished developments and people are losing their jobs left, right and centre. My how the world has changed in a matter of months!!

This unfinished building represents what comes between UK prospective tourists leaving the grey skies of London behind for a trip to beautiful Jamaica. For those who were unaware, we are in the midst of a major financial and economic crisis in the UK. So trying to get people to spend money they don’t have on any far-flung holiday with this shotgun, blunderbuss, marketing approach is a waste of money.

In a way it sadly illustrates the bankruptcy of ideas at the current Jamaica Tourist Board.
Its Old Hat!! No innovation!! The JTB is relying on expensive billboard advertising London-wide campaigns to market Jamaica but it’s woefully out of step with the average customer’s reality.

This sort of campaign campaign is now an invalid approach to bolstering the flagging tourism industry in Jamaica.

So thank you JTB for brightening up the London skyline with beautiful photos of Jamaica and making me feel homesick. But stop wasting the Jamaican tax-payers money and start some real innovative cost-effective, 21st Century marketing that will more cost-effectively entice likely travellers - those who can and will - to visit Jamaica.

The Cancer that is Corruption

I just returned to the UK from spending about 3 weeks in Jamaica – not a holiday more a working visit. It allowed me once more to immerse myself in the everyday living of my home country after playing tourist to it for the past 2 decades.

It was great to be home. My experience there had its fair share of enjoyment but the over-riding impression was what I have to term, I suppose, “shock and awe” at what passes for normal daily activity there. As I like to explain to my UK friends, if what persisted on the criminal front here in the UK like “wha-a –go-on” in Jamaica “dis ya time”, we would have to call it a WAR. I mean 1,500 people murdered per year in a population of 2.5 million (Jamaica) is equivalent to over 30,000 people in a population of close to 60 million (UK). It’s a very bloody sort of insidious social warfare at that. I had 3 personal incidents in the space of my less than 3 weeks visit which put me in the picture of what “really a go-on in Jamdown”.

During my stay there, on one occasion, I heard about 8 gunshots go off at around 10pm at night in my uptown neighbourhood. Reports the following day informed me it was a licensed firearm holder dispensing justice as he was confronted at his gate by 3 assailants, one holding a firearm. He had killed 2 of them and the third escaped. I cannot fault him on defending himself in such circumstances but it made the Gordon House debate raging at the time in the country about capital punishment an oxymoron. I mean, not only is capital punishment still officially on the law books of the land but it is meted out almost daily on the streets by a wide range of Jamaicans – police, soldiers and such licensed firearm holders. The Justice System has broken down in the beloved country and this incident was a manifestation of that fact.

On another occasion driving through the rural town of Port Maria, the traffic that I was caught up in ground to a slow moving crawl. It was about 3pm and children leaving school were part of the throng of people on and off the sidewalks. Something, one sensed, was in the air but as an unseasoned visitor little was I to know what would happen next. A man ran down the middle of the street right past my car with something in his right hand up in the air. Not running with panic but at a pace of serious intent – like he had done this before and his life depended on it. He was followed by another man with what was clearly a gun, more considerately held pointed down towards the tarmac. He was not more than 6 seconds behind the first man. Then, after another 5 seconds, a more heavily armed uniformed policeman followed them – again passing my car - and then it all then began to make sense as behind them all came a police vehicle, siren blaring. The crowd looked on – some with animated curiosity and some with nonchalance – perhaps, notwithstanding my surprise, this event was not so unusual for rural Port Maria in 2008. The leading man – the wanted criminal gunman - turned off the road and went down into a gully course of sorts and some schoolchildren even went to follow him to see where he was going. Some of the town elders, with sense, chased the children back. No gunshots were heard subsequently so one can surmise he made good his escape and mercifully no innocent bystanders were afflicted by what is the scourge of gun culture in Jamaica, on that occasion. Law and Order has broken down all over Jamaica Land we Love and this incident was a manifestation of that fact.

Again a matter of perspective I guess but Jamaica appears to me to be the “Wild, Wild West”. We could do well look to the history of America and its gun culture - both its cowboy days of “settling the west” and to the likes of Al Capone in his heyday in Chicago - to learn a few lessons about what causes this lawlessness and how to address this rather serious and unacceptable state of affairs.

But it was the final personal incident that crystallised for me the root of the problem in Jamaica today. The least lethal, "innocuous" even, of my experiences provided an epiphany moment. I had parked my car on a Saturday morning on Knutsford Bouvelard to go buy a pattie in Tastees. I hadn’t been inside more than 5 minutes when I came out to see my car jacked up and ready for towing away by one of 2 wreckers plainly now in sight. There were a cadre of policemen and policewomen around, some observing at a distance. I explained to the tow truck driver that I was resident overseas and was not conversant with the law regarding parking on weekends in what was a dead New Kingston. True a yellow line marked the edge of the pavement but there were no signs annunciating on the parking restrictions in force and I was accustomed to a single yellow meaning “No Parking” only on busy week work-days. Of course “Ignorance of the Law is No Excuse” except in this case, in Jamaica now – as the events were to prove as they unfolded - “THE LAW IS AN ASS”. So we got into a discussion with a policewoman hovering nearby with some of the associated paperwork of this legal infringement – within earshot but not intervening.

The conversation was intriguing and masterfully steered by him to achieve his ultimate objective as I was soon to find out. I explained that I was a visitor and showed him my UK driving license. Was he going to “mash up” my weekend? I said I would ride with him to the downtown pound where the car was “destined” so I could pay the fine and recover the car quickly.
But this was not the reply he was looking for, clearly. Call me naïve initially, and in the end complicit, but eventually I was enlightened to pay him JA$3,000 on the spot rather than find my own way to pay the JA$4,000 fine downtown. His friend took the money on the “blind side” to the nearby cops and he let the car down. I had to enact the charade of getting into the car as a technicality of this accepted alternative to “due legal process”. The policewoman moved in to hand back the paperwork to the tow driver and then moved on to join her colleagues after the convoluted transaction was sealed.

So I had, unceremoniously, joined the countless other “otherwise law-abiding” Jamaicans to become party to this corrupt state of affairs and right under the approving nose of the local police force – who no doubt, upon reflection of the play enacted, were in on the scam from the very beginning.

Corruption is thriving in Jamaica and, like a cancer, it is corrupting the unwitting citizens of the beautiful land and this incident was a clear manifestation of that fact.

And so there we have it. My trip home was an educational experience for an overseas, uninitiated visitor about the breakdown of law and order arising from a barely functioning legal system in a systemic corrupt framework that is now Jamaica.

If my late father – who had helped frame the legal and justice system for Jamaica as a newly independent country forty-six years ago - had not been cremated, he would surely be turning in his grave.

Air Jamaica's Death Knell?

I read with further disappointment the intention of Air Jamaica to shed 6 of its 15 planes and drop 6 routes from its service schedule this year (Jamaica Observer January 28, 2009). This is sheer madness and it would be better for Air Jamaica to close down completely, and thereby entirely avoid the risk of running a loss in the future – as this seems to be its SOLE objective. How ironic that the Government of Jamaica wants to retain the name and brand of Air Jamaica in its proposed plans to sell the airline yet it is reducing the company to a “ghost” of an international airline with this reductionist strategy.

Air Jamaica, despite pleas from the Diaspora population in the UK, sold it London route (for peanuts to Virgin by the then Minister of Finance of the previous administration) back in 2007. This was another bad commercial decision by a civil servant. We Jamaicans in the UK are now suffering the consequences. Virgin flights in December 2009 to Kingston are costing £983 per person for its cheapest economy seat and BA is charging £1,158 per person – CHEAPEST ECONOMY. Their planes (Boeing 747’s and 777’s) will be fully booked nevertheless, and mostly by members of the Jamaican Diaspora in the UK. This is what Air Jamaica gave up when it dropped the London route. Now it wants to ditch the Miami route and others.

The problems facing Air Jamaica with its operating loss are not so much its COSTS of operation as using the INCORRECT BUSINES MODEL for running an airline in the 21st Century. No doubt this is what the Air France consultants will tell them when they arrive in Jamaica, spend several months and charge for their fees. Space does not permit me to elaborate on the possible solutions, but as a consultant myself one knows that to solve a problem one should start with correctly defining the realities of the issue. Here are a few basic points:

Point One – Air Jamaica is a Diaspora Airline.

Point Two – Air Jamaica cannot and should not compete head-to-head with US based carriers.

Point Three – Air Jamaica will require FURTHER investment to turn it around (note the distinction between “cost” and “investment”).

Point Four - Current economic global environment means it’s unlikely to get a private buyer / investment, even in a cut-down version it is now pursuing.

Point Five – In determining the cost of running an airline one should look at the FULL ECONOMIC cost and benefit analysis, not just bottom line profits.

Point Six - The Caribbean has been in need of a proper regional airline for some time now.

A possible new business model involves thinking outside the realms of conventional, conservative - dare I say it – archaic, public sector thinking in Jamaica. So we could, for example, swallow our national pride, people, and merge Air Jamaica with Caribbean Airways and let the Caribbean benefit from a properly sized international airline that can serve the region and its peoples well. (One can do all sorts of fancy things with marketing, like co-branding etc, if we feel the need to keep the name of Air Jamaica alive).

To be sure, if we continue along this path proposed of cut, cut, cutting Air Jamaica we will be killing it slowly in any event. The loss to the economy of JAMAICA will be catastrophic as such actions further weaken the economic contributions from its Diaporan population whose hard earned income will flow increasingly to the likes of BA and Virgin, good airlines though they are.