The quarter of a million missing tourists

Remember tourists? You know, the guys with the plaid trousers and striped shirts, and the young office ladies in short skirts and high platform shoes who would do that alluring Garapan Strut?

Well, the tourists strutted elsewhere, after the Commonwealth ceased any effective promotional activity in Japan in parts of 1997-1998. This was just as the Japanese market was reeling from economic changes. Defending that market should have been done at any costs.

But it wasn’t done.

And the lack of warm bodies at the airport is easy to see (or, more to the point, easy not to see, I guess). Right now we’re at the tail end of Fiscal Year 2000, and, for reasons understood only by bureaucratic minds, visitor arrivals are tabulated on a fiscal year basis. Anyway, the last completed fiscal year, FY 1999, saw us host about a quarter million less visitors than FY 1997 did.

Got that? Almost a quarter million folks–gone. FY 2000 will be a little better, but that’s just a dead cat bounce.

A couple of years ago, based on some survey data, I came up with an average tourist expenditure of $805 here per visit. If we multiply this figure by the nearly quarter of a million missing visitors for FY 1999 (235,088 to be precise), we come up with this happy figure for lost sales in the Commonwealth…
…warning, brace yourself…

And here’s the number: $189 million.

And that’s just for one year–last fiscal year. This fiscal year won’t be much better. A good chunk of our economy has simply vanished into thin air. And much of that flew to other destinations.

Little wonder then, that the press has thought it newsworthy to contrast the Commonwealth with Guam after the Bank of Hawaii released some economic data. I mentioned it yesterday, and I’ll mention it today. The data, specifically per capita Gross Domestic Product, shows that the Commonwealth comes in at less than half of Guam’s level. Guam: $18,766. The CNMI: $8,367.

As the pieces fall into the economic puzzle, the picture isn’t looking all that pretty.

Airlines, hotels, golf courses, boating companies, restaurants, retail stores, tour operators…and the suppliers who service these industries…and the people who work for them…all have seen hundreds of millions of dollars in activity disappear over the past couple of years.

The good news is that with aggressive and proper planning, the CNMI can probably turn things around and get back on the road to prosperity. The bad news is that it’s later than most people think, and if things don’t improve soon, the law of economic gravity will arrive with all the force of a typhoon.