By Mabel Doge Luhan
If loving you is wrong, I don’t want to be right! Dear old Luther Ingram!
My previous article pointed out what [Marianas Visitors Authority] is doing wrong. And it was just on the day of their general membership meeting: a room full of members! And the public was even invited to attend this government agency meeting — for $40 a person! That… doesn’t… sound… legal.
Well, if MVA is wrong, then what is right?
What with the recent bear market in blood diamonds, I couldn’t spare two Jacksons to attend their meeting. (And just think: three Jacksons is all it takes to become an expert on China, according to some of our most vocal critics.) So I have no firsthand knowledge of What’s Going On (Marvin Gaye, 1971). But what I imagine is Chris Concepcion as Adriano Celentano in that brilliant bit from Formula Due, in the very same year as the Luther Ingram song:
Or as David Byrne observed five years later, “You’re talking a lot, but you’re not saying anything.”
All on our dime. We’re paying their salaries and their travel expenses. Because this meeting was just too important to hold over Zoom. Or not hold at all.
As Young Thug aptly calculated, “Just did the math; that’s like two thousand dollars every word.”
The June 21st Marianas Variety (Bryan Manabat, “MVA retains three board members, elects one new member”) quoted Board member Vicky Benavente saying the quiet part out loud: “My number one priority is to help MVA get its funding.”That… doesn’t… sound… right.
But that’s all kvetching and fault-finding. To quote Lenin, “What is to be done?”
The problem is that we don’t have enough tax revenue or economic activity, and that’s (supposedly) because we don’t have enough tourists. And MVA’s attempts to fix the tourism problem by getting more “seats” or “flights” is like if Governor Palacios announced he’s going to fix the revenue problem by opening more bank accounts.
Unfortunately, selling a destination to strangers isn’t like selling Amway to your cousin. You won’t get them to buy it by just harassing them a bit more. You need to improve the product.
Chris Concepcion seems to be aware of this, at least at the level of verbiage. “It takes a village,” he wrote in his May 29th Marianas Variety opinion piece. He pointed out that many of the CNMI’s faults as a destination can be traced to many other government departments being amiss in their jobs. Absolutely. Absolutely they can be. But if you’re taking our money to fix the tourism situation, then either you fix it, or you resign and close up shop. You can’t keep taking our money while saying it’s not your fault.
And rather than pay for another “study” or hire more people or jet off to another luxury resort “seminar,” can a few of you just sit down and read (using Google Translate if necessary) what our tourists are saying about us?
I’ve done some of that for you. As you must surely know as experts on Korean tourists (CHARIZZ!), Naver is a popular blogging service in Korea. And as all of you must be fluent in Korean (CHAROT!), you certainly know that Saipan in Korean is 사이판. So we can Google search for what Korean travel bloggers are saying about us:
Of course most of it is positive. Of course they mostly love Saipan. (Some of them are sponsored by travel providers or themselves travel providers, but forget that for now.) But if we’re trying to find out where we can improve (in business school we called that GAP ANALYSIS). So let’s look for the criticisms. Note that these are screenshots of Google automated translations, so of course the translations are imperfect. And note that of course this isn’t any kind of scientific study: it’s just some cherry-picking of random tidbits. But good enough for government work.
Any surprises?
The biggest complaint is always the expense, especially of taxis. Why is MVA doing absolutely nothing about this — while spending tens of thousands of dollars jetting off to Malaysia, Australia, and New Orleans? Simply allowing the “illegal” taxis to operate legally (and allowing people without immigration status to get driver’s licenses), or allowing the “legal” taxis to compete on price and advertise prices, could fix this. Or some of those MVA millions could be put into boosting the COTA bus service to run more often and perhaps go up north to Marpi.
MVA doesn’t control taxi licensing or driver’s licenses? True enough. But it can lobby. And lobbying for improvements here in the CNMI is a lot more productive than wining and dining airline executives in Langkawi — even if less glamorous.
What else? The usual. Nobody likes cockfighting. Everyone complains about the ridiculous prices. Apparently tourists think an average meal in Saipan costs $20-$40. I don’t know what MVA can do about this, but perhaps making it easier to open a business in Saipan would help? Encouraging food trucks around Garapan? When MVA is run by the hotels, of course that would never happen — but that’s part and parcel of the completely absurd situation where the hotel cartel controls a government agency, and where HANMI is treated as a savior of the people, rather than as a private moneymaking organization.
There are the expected racist comments about “natives.” We can’t do anything about that, save for skin bleach. (I DID HAVE QUITE A SUCCESSFUL TREATMENT ON MY BACK HOLE.) And of course the complaints about the aggressive “locals” (most of them aren’t actually local, but sure, anyone brown-skinned is “local” to a tourist) — what ever happened to DPS’s many, many promises to institute community policing and cops on bikes and on foot?
Any complaints about unlicensed tour guides? No. Any requests for gambling venues? No.
But what do tourists’ actual tastes and preferences matter, when the number one priority is to help MVA get its funding?
