Up Front

with the Editor

I suppose it is what lawyers would call “a notorious fact” that prices are high in Tahiti. But you can’t make that statement and simply leave it at that, because the paradox is that not all prices are high some things in Tahiti are good value indeed but why the variations?

For instance, a couple of miles in a taxi will cost the visitor about S 3 Australian, and almost double after 11 o’clock at night, when there is a heavy and inexplicable surcharge. But for less than $5 you can fly the 10 or 11 miles between Tahiti and her sister island of Moorea. For $3 you can take a long and pleasant boat trip to Moorea.

And for a flat 20 cents you can travel just about anywhere you want on Tahiti in one of the many clean and fast buses—the famous trues.

Again inexplicably, the buses dis appear from dusk to dawn, leaving the visitor in the hands of the avarici ous taxi drivers.

Good French wine is not expensive by the bottle in Tahiti’s shops (it is considerably more costly in the hotel dining rooms). Less than $2 will buy you an excellent vintage at the corner store. For a mere 80 cents, with something back on the bottle, you can buy a litre of drinkable rough red.

Yet you’ll pay anything from 45c to 60c for a meagre 10 oz bottle of locally-brewed beer considerably more in the bar, of course. They usu ally ask for $1 there. Why should Tahiti beer be so expensive?

In view of Tahiti’s reputation for high costs, you might be surprised to learn that Tahiti’s hotel tariffs are comparable with those anywhere else, and might even be a shade better than the tariffs of some horrible hostelries in Melanesia.

It’s not the room rate that makes the Tahiti visitor look with horror at his final bill, but the “little extras”, such as laundry and room service, and his continental breakfasts. (There is nothing little about his lunch, dinner and bar bills).

The extras are the reason for Tahiti having gained a reputation for high prices (not excluding the $4 tax per

person extracted from the traveller as he departs from that fine airport terminal). Anybody who plans his trip to Tahiti merely on the basis of basic hotel tariffs is in for a rude shock.

In issuing this warning I am not— and please note it—attempting to turn visitors away from Tahiti. On the con trary, Tahiti is now more lovely than it was, which makes it beautiful in deed, and the people are perhaps even more friendly than they were, which makes them warm indeed, and Tahiti is an island to be visited. Nobody could claim he had seen the South Seas unless he included a visit to the New Cythera.

But it seems to me there is a lesson here for those territories which seek to make their money out of the tourist. Reputations travel with the speed of a jet, and travellers like to compare notes on where their dollars got the best value.

There is not much point in his hotel playing fair and square if much of the rest of the local business community takes the visitor for a sucker as soon as his sunglasses and camera are seen to emerge from the hotel foyer.

The average visitor, wondering in retrospect just how his money dissi pated so swiftly and so soundlessly, is inclined to tar everybody with the same brush. He doesn’t say, “Wine was cheap, but cab prices are a shocker!” He says, “Hell, Tahiti is expensive!”

It’s true that if he took his eye from his camera viewfinder long enough he might perhaps find out about le true, or the corner foodstand where he can eat, from a paper plate, half a tender roast chicken and enough french fries to last him till breakfast, all for a dollar.

But most tourists are busy people, on a tight schedule, and they haven’t

the time to search for the economies.

They rely on local goodwill for pro tection against overcharging, and the local community must take collective blame if the visitor goes away feeling he hasn’t got value for money. He wifi tell everybody about his unhappy ex perience, and he will return again only to those places where he gets value.

I don’t preclude the hotels from these comments. They take the blame too if they follow a policy of inflating bar prices to gain on the swings what they missed on the tariff roundabout.

Or if they keep tariffs higher than they need to be because they think it’s what the traffic will bear.

Take the unhappy case of Papeete’s Hotel Taaone, which closed at a moment’s notice in September (PIM, Oct., p. 41). As we said then, there were a number of reasons for the closing of that once-famous hotel, and most of them are the subject of con troversy anyhow. But those with ex perience in the travel business say that the Taaone failed to recognise that it had slipped as a first-class hotel, but it continued to charge first-class prices. It would have done better to have reduced tariffs and sought to at tract those wanting a good hotel with out the high-priced extras.

In other words, value for money.

You can say what you like, but value for money will get us customers in, whether they are selling us Tahiti or a mouse-trap. Any businessman who flies in the face of that fact does so at his own peril, and all the experts on tourism won’t convince me that when it comes to value the tour ist business is any different in prin ciple from any other.

Stuart Inder