Forum

Sir I REFER to your Special Survey article entitled “Slow Response from Tourism Bureaus” which appeared in the Febru ary edition of Pacific Islands Monthly and note that the Fiji Visitors Bureau is mentioned as one of the National Tourist Offices which did not respond to your one page questionnaire dated November 5, 1993, on the topic of driving in Fiji which was signed by a a Mr David S North and addressed to the “Tourism Director, c/- Prime Minister’s Office Suva”.

The management of the Bureau would like to express its concern at the content of this article as we make a point of answering every enquiry that is sent to us, even from local schoolchildren.

We also do our best to complete the hundreds of questionnaires that are sent to us regularly.

After reading this article, we made enquiries at the Prime Minister’s office as well as with the Department of Tourism. Both organisations have ad vised us that they have no record of ever having received the questionnaire re ferred to nor has tbe Bureau ever received it.

We can only assume that it is lying somewhere in the postal department of the Fiji Post and Telecommunications Department due to the fact that the address given by Mr North was incom

plete.

The least the Pacific Islands could have done was to check with the Bureau to ascertain whether in fact we had received the said questionnaire before bursting into print. We expect this from

any professional organisation.

I. Bainimara

Chief Executive Fiji Visitor’s Bureau

Editor’s note - Not long after our February issue hit the streets, I got a call from Ilisoni Vuidreketi of the FVB expressing his concern at the article.

I quote from the fax I sent him in response to his phone call “PlM’s survey of tourist bureaus was designed to be a real life test of the system. We assumed, for example, that the typical tourist would NOT have the street address, nor the exact name of the tourist agency, in each island. So, each letter of inquiry was addressed to the tourism director, c/o the head of government, and sent to the capital of the nation.

“This was sufficient address to cause 17 of the 27 bureaus concerned to

respond to the inquiry from populous

Hawaii to remote Tokelau but the inquiry was unable to find its way

through Fiji’s postal/government sys

tem.”

This I think is fairly self-explanatory.

It was a real-life test, if we had wanted to we could have delivered a question naire to Mr Bainimara personally, but that would have defeated the purpose of the exercise.

Obviously the fault does not lie with the FVB but with the postal or government system. Someone has not been willing to use a little bit of their time and initiative and direct the letter in the right direction. How many more of this type of letter are lying forgotten, gathering dust in some lonely corner of an office? Perhaps it is time to find out.

Cause of concern: the February issue