In December 2019, just weeks before Covid clasped the planet in its deathly embrace, I was in Italy on vacation with my family. We were two families, and it was our children doing all the plotting, the itinerary, and the bookings. In Rome, we were booked into a fabulous apartment just a stone’s throw from the Vatican for convenient access to the magnificent temporal headquarters of the Catholic Church.
However, this piece is not about the many splendours of Italy and why that country continues to be amongst the top five in terms of visitors.
Let me start with the apartment where I stayed in Rome. It was booked through Airbnb. When we arrived late in the evening, the owner was there to receive us.
He didn’t have to – so long as the keys were available. But he felt a personal acquaintance was better. Thoughtfully, he brought along two bottles of wine for us and some bread and milk in the fridge just in case we felt the need. No, this was not part of the deal. It was just the class of the owner shining through. Also, he had all the time in the world to explain a few things to us. What we got was better than what we had seen on the net – at least that is what my nephew told me.
Vacation in Coorg
Cut to January 2024. Another branch of our family was visiting home from North America and decided to take a vacation in Coorg. So, they booked an apartment in that city through Airbandb and travelled straight from Houston to Bengaluru and onwards to Coorg. What they got in Coorg was so appalling that they chose to cut short their holiday and returned to a family home in Bengaluru two days earlier. To say that the experience was a bitter disappointment would be an understatement.
What it also did was to compel them to cancel another Airbandb reservation that they had made for another excursion to Jaipur and opt for a safer fourstar hotel that was sure to deliver on what one saw on the net. Interestingly an earlier booking at a hotel in Bhubaneswar was also a bit of a disaster prompting them to change accommodation hours after their arrival. But one had warned them: after all any place named as Hotel Bollywood ought to be treated with great suspicion. And so it turned out – seedy, unlivable and an owner who hemmed and hawed but declined to return the deposit. What they saw was not what they got.
Backbone of hospitality
The story of Indian tourism is replete with tales of fabulous pictures, delectable prose and the promise of a heavenly experience that has constantly and consistently underdelivered. The world over, it isn’t the star category of hotels – the four and five-stars – that is the backbone of the hospitality business, but the smaller hotels, the inns and the motels. They are the engine of tourism that brings in the numbers-Europe is full of them and the heavyweights – France, Italy, Spain, Greece and Portugal are full of these little places that offer quality service and decent food at reasonable rates. Most important, you get what you see and what you are promised.
This brings us now to Maldives and the silly and unbecoming comments from some of the juveniles promoted as ministers (and now suspended) in that country. It is a given that the tourism traffic from India to the Maldives will nosedive. It is a given that Bollywood and the rest of the celebrity circuit will shun the Maldives as if it didn’t exist. It is a given that the Chinese, even if they try their darndest, will not be able to replace India either in tourism or as first responders (they have no Kareena Kapoor or Katrina Kaif to tell them about the many splendours of sunbathing on those beaches). The mainland is just 30 minutes by air from Male.
Maldives President Mohamed Muizzu’s Cabinet colleagues must be condemned for the language they used against Prime Minister Modi. But let us touch our hearts and accept the fact that we have often allowed others to deride Indian tourism because what we show is not what we provide.
If this incident can act as a catalyst to help us transform Indian tourism into a world-beater with world-class facilities that deliver what it promises, it will be the best answer to the delinquents in Male.
