ANGKOR WAT AND THE IMPACT OF UNCONTROLLED TOURISM A FINAL RUIN TO ONE OF THE ANCIENT WONDERS OF THE WORLD

Posted on October 1, 2011 by Super Administrator

by John Semone, CTC

One of my great experiences in my years of travel was my trip to Siem Reap, Cambodia and my visit to the Angkor Temples.  My wife and I spent two exciting days exploring the ancient city and the surrounding temples back in 2002.  Recently, a friend of mine returned from Siem Reap and his visit to the temples and reports that tourism is out of control.  Cheap shops selling souvenirs made in China now line the streets leading to the temples, throngs of tourist trample on the 1,000 year old stones leading to the main temple.  This relentless tread of feet along with the fumes from heavy traffic wear away the soft sandstone of the temples and the main bridge to Angkor Wat.

It would appear that there is no government plan in place for limiting the number of visitors each day to visit those ancient sites.  And it is my understanding that tourist arrivals quadrupled from 60,000 in 1999 to 250,000 in 2001.  This year it is expected that there will be over 2.5 million and that by 2020 some 6 million visitors are projected to visit Siem Reap and the temples of Angkor Wat.

With no long range sustainable tourism plan in place, uncontrolled tourism will be the final ruin of one of the great ancient wonders of the world. Add to that that there is no clear accounting or infrastructure plan for the revenue taken in for entrance fees to the temples.The problem may lie in what is taking place in most of the world heritage sites; greed, cronyism,corruption at both the government and private sectors and uncontrolled development of tourism.  Unless quick and decisive action is taken, mass tourism at Angkor Wat will be the ultimate downfall of this great wonder of the world. It may already be too late but the government of Cambodia must work with organizations like UNESCO and other heritage and sustainable tourism organizations in a coordinated effort to preserve Angkor Wat, one of the ancient treasurers of the world.  The goose that laid the golden egg will end up in the frying pan.

John A. Semone

Former managing director Europe for the Pacific Asia Travel Association

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Manual for Tour Guides: Lecture 1

Posted on October 1, 2011 by Super Administrator

by Patrick Moran

Tourism is a pure marketing exercise. What we are selling is Viet Nam. The starting point is the basic principles of marketing. Unless we obey them we will fail. They are well known to all our successful competitors. Fortunately they are simple, obvious and identical everywhere. They apply to all products in all places.  In theory. Putting them into practice is difficult. This lecture will be about the simple obvious theory. All subsequent lectures will be about the difficult project of translating them into action.

I always allocate plenty of time for questions at the end so write them down and don’t interrupt. However, I do want you to interrupt if, as a native speaker, I use obscure vocabulary or speak too quickly so that you do not understand. Hold up your hand immediately to mention what it is that you do not understand so that I can explain again in a different way. OK? What does “obscure” mean?  Nobody knew!  So why did you not all hold up your hand?  Learn from that example about modifying your culture. You are in the business of dealing with foreigners! It is your job to learn their culture not their job to learn yours. “The customer is always right.”

I said that the basic principles were simple, obvious and universal. In fact they are so simple and obvious that I’m not going to tell you what they are. You are going to tell me. I want you to tell me all your reasons for not buying something. Each time I will take it away. It no longer applies. You still don’t want to buy. Why not?  I want all the reasons. Then we know exactly what we must do so that you buy. These are not selling steps. They are buying steps. OK, start telling me your reasons for not buying something.

In the UK this presents a problem. I am inundated with reasons for not buying. There are only four. The others are covering up a real reason. I have to think on my feet to prove that four are real and the others are not. In Viet Nam I have a different problem. Silence! I deal with this using a shoe box which is priced at $2000. After the silence I demand $2000 from somebody in the front row. They are amazed. “I invited you to give a reason for not buying. You gave no reason. So, I want my $2,000. Oh, you haven’t got $2,000? You mean you can’t afford it. Why didn’t you say so?”  OK, we will remove that reason. You all have a rich uncle in San Francisco. You received an envelope this morning containing $2,000 but had to come to this lecture without time to spend any. You all have $2,000 in your pocket but you still do not want to buy my box. Why not?

At this point somebody usually has the sense to ask what is in the box. I reveal that it is empty. They decide that they do not want or need an empty box! Especially for $2,000!  OK, let’s take that reason away. It’s a computer. You are in business and all your competitors have precisely this computer. Without it you will go out of business. You can afford it, you badly want and need it but you are still not going to buy my box. Why not?  There is a competitor of mine down the road offering exactly the same thing for $1,800. OK, let’s take away the competitor. You can afford it, you need and want it, no better price available, but you still don’t buy. Why not?  My purchasing arrangements are not convenient. I only accept dollars in cash. No credit, no dong, no cheques etc. My competitor is still there with the same deal as me but making it much easier to buy. OK,  I’ve solved that.  Now will you buy? Yes. THERE ARE NO OTHER REASONS FOR NOT BUYING. I try to prise as many of these answers as possible from the Vietnamese students. In the UK I get them all automatically plus a lot more that are not real.

OK. If we deal successfully with these four items we have a sale. We must deal with them in order of importance. What do you think comes first? The usual answer is “Can’t afford it.” This ignores the fact that “afford” is a flexible concept. Suppose my wife and I visit your gallery of paintings. We see one that we think is absolutely horrible. Don’t try and negotiate a price that we can afford. As a gift we would throw it away. On another wall is a painting with which we both fall in love. It would give us pleasure every day. We normally have an expensive dinner once a week. If you negotiate the same price as the dinner we have a choice. We can miss the dinner this week because we want the painting more. ”Afford” is comparative. It entirely depends on how badly we want or need it. Of course this doesn’t apply to selling $10,000 watches to poor people but we are not in that position. Our customers can all afford it. There are 900 million of them who can afford it otherwise they wouldn’t be tourists. Our job is to convince them that they want to come back to Viet Nam rather than Thailand and tell all their friends and relatives. This puts our project in the right order. 1/ Find out what the customers want. 2/ Find out what the customers can afford. (3 star, 5 star whatever.)  3/ Find out what the competition is offering. 4/ Make it easy to buy. If they come back, you have done this and are a success. If they don’t come back you have not done this and are a failure. 85% return to Spain. 15% return to Viet Nam and they are mostly Viet Kieu. We need to improve our marketing.

That’s the easy bit. The theory. All future lectures will be about the difficult job of translating it into action. Let’s start at the airport. You are taking a group of 30 new arrivals from Europe at Tan Son Nhat by coach to their hotel. What will you say to them en route? Next week I will pick a few of you at random to hear your individually prepared presentation.

Any questions?

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Manual for Tour Guides: Lecture 2

Posted on September 30, 2011 by Super Administrator

by Patrick Moran

I have listened to four presentations for the coach trip between airport and hotel. Let’s talk about communication first. You can’t sell me anything if we can’t communicate! I cannot communicate in your language at all so you start in a superior position. Whatever your quality of my language may be. Our communication depends purely on your ability. There is one question and one question only. Do we understand one another? Do I understand what you say and do you understand what I say? To be fair I should keep it slow and simple but not all tourists are reliable about that!

I interrupted once or twice to correct pronunciation. There is a tendency among Vietnamese not to pronounce consonants at the end of words. My ten year old Vietnamese stepdaughter could say one word. “Goodnigh.”  My first lesson was “Goodnigh T” which became a standard expression. 16 years later she speaks wonderful English. Why? She has spoken English to me every day. That’s the way she learned Vietnamese. I sometimes say : “No, we would say it this way.” If she asks why, I say I don’t know. Ask your Vietnamese teacher about the grammar! My usual example is my young grandson saying he rided his bike. You mean “rode”. I didn’t mention the grammar. Neither did your Vietnamese parents when you were starting the language. There is a message in this story. Practice, practice, practice. I am amazed that you are allowed to speak Vietnamese on these premises. It is supposed to be a school for English speaking tour guides! How many conversation classes do you have? I will hold some at my house on Sundays. Any subject. Football, the weather, but they are English subjects! You will not be allowed to use one word of Vietnamese to one another after entering the gate until you leave.

Hopefully there are similar schools for Chinese and Japanese speaking tour guides. The very successful tour industries in southern Europe are based on very frequent returns by people from cold northern Europe. Our most frequent potential returns will be from people in cold northern Asia.

In a way our problem is worse. I took my Vietnamese wife on a London Thames tourist boat when most of the other customers seemed to be Japanese. A London cockney tour guide. Their dialect does not pronounce “h” at the beginning of a word or “t” in the middle of a word. An ospi al with an i bio ics. (A hospital with antibiotics!) I don’t think the Japanese understood much of what he said! They didn’t understand cockney humour either. A hospital with a ten month waitng list for pregnancy tests. I was the only one who laughed!

Communicating with people starts with a name. You could adopt a name for yourselves with simple international spelling. Tan, Den etc for your first item – introduction. My name? In my culture Mr.Moran. In your culture Mr.Patrick. Spending a week together informally I would suggest “Pat.” You need to remember as many names as possible as the days go by.

Now we can start on principle number one. “Find out what the customers want.” How? There is only one way. Ask! Any presentation which fails to start or finish by inviting questions is no good. You all started with a presentation about Vietnamese history or culture. Different nationalities and age groups want different things. That is why another principle is to introduce maximum choice. However, I can tell you that this is the opposite of what anyone wants!  Another principle is what we call “put yourslf in their shoes.” Imagine yourself in their situation. Say two hours from your front door to the international airport. Two hours demanded for international check-in. How long a flight before an hour for refuelling and shopping at Dubai airport? How long for the flight to Singapore, an hour for the connecting flight, then the flight to Saigon and processing to get on your coach? You would have the same question as all of them. “Some international airports are two hours from the hotel by coach. How long is this one?” You might as well demonstrate that you know what you are doing by answering that question before they even ask. ” Ladies and gentlemen, dependent on the traffic we will be at the hotel in about 30 minutes where we have arranged a fast check-in to get you to your room for a siesta, or shower, or bath as quickly as possible.”

None of you did any of this! Culture, history? Reverse the situation. You have saved up to make the long journey to England for a week and I meet you with a coach at Heathrow.  Fortunately that is a long way from central London hotels because we have a lot of history and cultural influences. The Romans, the Vikings, the French, but even during the last few hundred years we have had wars with every single country in Europe, we have had every single country in Europe as an ally in wars and our American colony fought us for their independence. We also built the biggest empire the world has ever seen. Just a minute. I am an amateur. If that is your interest you should read the books written by professionals. You didn’t need to come to England at all!  The only point in coming to England is to actually see some of this heritage and actually see what England is like today.

I knew about this tour guide problem on my very first trip in Viet Nam on my first visit in 1994. I was absorbing the view from a clifftop coffee bar outside Nga Ttrang. A coach screeched to a stop in a cloud of dust and disgorged a tour guide with a party. He told them that a promontory looked like a giant stone fairy and embarked on a long legend about how her giant stone husband had left her there. They then re-embarked and departed in another cloud of dust. Obviously the worst tour guide in the world. Except that during the next half hour two more did exactly the same thing! We don’t travel all this way to have our intelligence insulted. It wasn’t much like a giant stone fairy and the legend was obviously all lies. “See Naples and die.” Flat straight stony cold beaches with no trees are boring. Ideally a view should have bays, islands, hills and trees. I like the bay of Naples. Especially seen from Positano or Capri. Is it better than Nga Trang Bay, Ha Long Bay, many other bays in Viet Nam or around the world? A silly question. They are all different and all second to none by containing all these elements.

Just a minute. Culture gap. Different nationalities and age groups want different things. Perhaps some people are oblivious of scenery and like legends. “The customer is always right.”  Where possible always offer a choice. “Ladies and gentlemen, we are going to stop on a clifftop before we get to Nha Trang. Only for 20 minutes or so because we need to check-in but there will be time for a coffee. Alternatively, if you follow me a few metres down a path I will tell you the legend of the giant stone fairy.”

There may even be some people who would prefer your short amateur version of Vietnamese culture and history to reading the books. “Ladies and gentlemen I could give a talk about that tomorrow morning in room X at the hotel before we leave for our schedule. How many of you would like me to do that?”

Lecture 3 & 4. I will want to hear as many as possible giving this presentation on the coach from the airport on which I shall comment. I shall expect a much better plan than I heard today which is why I told you to take notes and will continue to help with pronunciation..

Lecture 5 & 6. We now need to prepare for some practical experience. Talking to real tourists. An obvious possibility is market research. That will give you practical experience and also some ideas about what they want. I have designed a veryshort questionnaire.  Mr.Hoa and I never talk about things we haven’t done ourselves. We used this in some Saigontourist hotels with permission from the managers. In any case there are always uniquely local problems. Everybody was very friendly about answering. People are flattered to be asked what they think. However, Vietnamese packages always have an excessive schedule. Some of them were about to leave on an organised trip or had an arrangement to meet friends. Some said they had only just arrived and did not know much about VN yet. The ideal solution would be to take groups of you to the departure lounge at the airport where people have boring time to kill and have not just arrived. Mr.Hoa is convinced we will not get permission to do that so we will have to accept that problem.

Today Mr.Hoa and I will give you a demonstration and then take it in turns to act as the foreigner when you individually embark on market research in this lecture room. That will also be the itinery next week.

Lecture 7++. The real world!  Take small groups to hotels. They can listen to me and Mr.Hoa first. We will then listen to them.

Lectures 6 & 7 never actually happened! Mr.Hoa had been allocated to a new function. I never heard from Saigontourist School for Tour Guides again!

Conclusion. Obviously thís should be printed but if so this is merely an initial draft which requries further thought. I already have additional items for the introduction!

Yours sincerely,  Patrick Moran.

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PATA and Sustainable Tourism

Posted on September 22, 2011 by Super Administrator

by John Semone. CTC

In the late 1990′s PATA (the Pacific Asia Travel Association) established the Green Leaf Program.  A program designed for its members and the tourism industry at large to deal with issues relating to sustainable and responsible tourism.  There was a code of ethics developed for every segment of the tourism industry and key issues concerning preservation of culture, heritage and historical monuments in Asia/Pacific were addressed. Awards were given for PATA members who met the criteria for responsible tourism and certificates given to member companies who met the standards of sustainability for their given sector.  A sustainable and responsible committee was established and was part of the agenda at each Board of Directors meeting.  Chapter members world wide developed environmental/sustainable programs within their respective areas.

It was a “all hands on deck” approach to the issues and there was great media support at every step of the way.

The UNEP took note and included PATA in their annual meetings in Paris.  An annual booklet on PATA member Best Practices was published for three years, which drew positive interest and respect from other tourism organizations. The European Chapters held environmental workshops in a number of countries where, in many cases, local political leaders participated.  Several of the World Chapter Meetings were dedicated to tourism environmental issues and for several years there was a break out session on sustainable tourism at the Annual PATA Conference.

Now, at a time when the elements of greed and self interest among the owners and some leaders of industry become stronger with little concern about the long range impact their quick revenue will have on environment, culture, heritage and sustainability, where is the voice of PATA?

Prudent support and guidance from PATA and the re-establishment of a Green Leaf Program could make a difference.  PATA appears to have abandoned any and all issues relating to sustainable and responsible tourism.  The preservation of culture, heritage and sustainable responsible tourism should be rekindled with the new management team.

PATA bring back the strong voice within the Asia/Pacific that you once had!  Send a clear message to the tourism industry that the Association and its members do care about the future of tourism in

Asia/ and the Pacific …. don’t let the Green Leaf turn black!

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