While, economists tend to measure tourism in visitor numbers, employment and/or contribution to GDP, an equally important gauge is the level of infrastructure development and the intensity of tourism “hotspots” (full of enthusiastic tour guides corralling tours through the nation’s must see sites). Theses abound at the pyramids, the Acropolis, St. Mark’s Square, the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower, but apart from a few weary public servants pointing to Roman columns at Baalbek, this level of tourist development has yet to be seen in Lebanon.

The BCD may be crowded night after night, but the continued total administrative indifference to emergency access needs and non-implementation of regulatory codes (which the ministry of tourism proclaimed only a few months ago would “absolutely be enforced before the summer”) in itself tells a story about the current art of managing tourism development.

But even the BCD still doesn’t radiate the air of a conventional tourism hotspot. Neither do Lebanon’s shores bear the mark of highly developed tourism displayed around the Mediterranean by sun-and-fun coastal villages, which rival their countries’ world-famous tourism landmarks as crowd magnets.

In this light, Lebanon’s tourism development is entering virgin territory. While the role of Beirut as Jet Set playground and entertainment attraction in the 60s has been touted ad nauseam, one local expert believes Lebanon never was a tourism destination, at least in the sense it would have us believe.

“Lebanon doesn’t belong to the classic scheme of tourism development of the type you find in catalogues, with hotels by the seaside, buffets, one tennis court per each 15 or 18 hotel rooms, and so forth,” said Guy Gay-Para, holder of a doctorate in tourism and owner of a café at Byblos Port. “This kind of tourism has been developed years ago in countries with dozens of kilometers of undeveloped seashores, such as Morocco, Tunisia, the Spain of Franco, the Portugal of Salazar. Recent history has shown that there never was Lebanese tourism in the classic sense. Lebanon was merely a convenient and convivial location that fused business and pleasure.”

However historical reflection is, it can be argued, irrelevant. The world of leisure travels today is very different from what it was 30 years ago and it is not enough to simply reproduce the past. Consumer behavior is diversifying and maturing. Providers and destinations have to increasingly deliver tourism products and services that are not only price competitive and high in quality but also satisfy social and environmental criteria.

This has not escaped the ministry of tourism (which, incidentally still has to demonstrate that it has a firm grasp of what is expected of it). “Our goal is really sustainable tourism,” said the ministry’s director general, Nada Sardouk. “We are working to develop the ‘Hidden Lebanon’, the many beautiful areas of the country that are not yet on the map. What we want for tourism is to achieve is social and economic development.”

What the ministry still has to demonstrate is a full grasp of what is expected of it. In a measure under its authority, it is currently completing the country-wide installation of sign posts and plans to issue comprehensive visitor maps. Although tourism conservation and development issues are spread over numerous institutions other than the ministry, and budget restraints hamper its operation, Sardouk said the shortage of funds did not present an insurmountable problem for the ministry’s role in tourism promotion, thanks (rather surprisingly) to inter-ministerial collaboration and (not surprisingly) barter deals with the private sector.

A good tourism infrastructure relies to a great portion on general infrastructure, road and transportation networks, water and electricity supply, waste collection and waste treatment. According to Sardouk, major highways and access roads to key tourist areas are in a good working order, but she agreed that general infrastructure needs more work. “The council of ministers has taken the decision to review roads and electricity supply to all mountain villages during the summer,” she said, and optimistically, “We still need a two to three year action plan for infrastructure development on water and electricity.”

While most of its aspects are public sector, a significant portion of tourism infrastructure is created by the private sector, from hotels and car rental companies to tour operators and visitor attractions. Here, the Lebanese state has instituted some support mechanism for the creation of this tourism infrastructure under the stipulations of the IDAL investment law 360, which since 2002 has benefited several large projects.

Although many operators say that they nonetheless do not see enough effective government support for development and usually rely on their own devices to plan and execute tourism ventures in absence of clear-cut communal or national strategy framework, the private sector does credit the ministry of tourism with making efforts in favor of their development.

Sardouk on her part described the partnership between private sector and ministry as “very good.” She added that the ministry is quietly “cleaning the house” of the tourism sector from defunct operators and that the quality of tour guide services is being upgraded under a new law, which, (rather bizarrely) mandates new guides to graduate from a specialized four-year university course. As far as being able to accommodate growing visitor numbers over the coming five years, she said she did not expect any bottlenecks in the supply of hotel rooms and facilities, tour buses, or any other aspect of the sector.

An essential operative aspect for securing functional tourism infrastructure, where private and public sector may find difficulties, is in understanding demand and matching it to what the country can supply or is willing to develop. Here Lebanon is facing an interesting challenge, because even at today’s relatively low inflows, the “typical” Lebanon tourist cannot be easily defined.

The guest from the Gulf region, whether he arrives by private jet, in economy class, or by car, is commonly viewed as a long-term guest, seeking a summer base, shopping and entertainment. Around Beirut and in the traditional mountain resort communities, ample evidence shows that many providers made a priority of developing facilities that appeal to this category of tourist.

Visitors from the Levant countries represent a different category, yet, with Syrian and Jordanian guests ranking third and fourth (after Saudi and Lebanese clients) for total hotel nights booked last year, this group represents a market potential that one hears little about. Tourists from outside the region comprise two distinct major groups: Lebanese expatriates and non-Arab (largely cultural and religious travelers with no discernable ancestral ties to the Eastern Mediterranean).

For the time being, data of arrivals and hotel stays (of over 160 nationalities by number of persons, total nights and average length of stay) by the ministry of tourism are quantitative. Because research hasn’t been more specific, the ministry for instance broadly assumes that holders of foreign passports are genuinely foreign as many expatriates enter the country using Lebanese identification. However, in case of second and third generation foreign-born Lebanese, this may not be the case (the number of Brazilian, Mexican and Argentinean hotel clients in 2003, all countries where persons of Lebanese descent make a good share of the population, were comparatively high).

The composition of anticipated future visitor streams, thought to include more and younger individual travelers from out of region, complicates the picture further. Behavior patterns in some of the main origin countries of international tourists digress seriously from public moral standards that apply in the Middle East and many western tourists today expect to be able to openly pursue activities that are not accepted under local behavior codes.

Under maturing trends in interests of European and other international travelers on the other hand, Lebanese tourism can expect to encounter strong and increasing demand for tourism products that they cannot readily supply. Beirut, for instance, lacks a museum that would guide visitors through the country’s cultural and communal diversity or explain the aspects of Lebanese history that people from around the world associate with the country – its exposure to the Middle East conflict. Health, eco- and agro-tourism are vacation growth areas that public and private sector have only recently awakened to and where soft and hard infrastructures need yet to be defined.

With tourism acting as the globalization force in culture, intensification of visitor arrivals would oblige operators and authorities here to embark on a steep learning and action curve in avoiding mistakes made elsewhere during the rise of mass tourism, evolve the tourism infrastructure in a multitude of features, and secure development that can enrich the national existence frame on environmental, cultural, social, and economic terms. In all that, the human element is the combining factor at the core of all tourism infrastructures. “The tourist will know if you lie to him,” said experienced tour guide Francoise Hobeika. “You have to make the tourists see the country through your eyes, let them feel the place and sense the beauty of the land so that they enjoy their visit.”

Besides nine main historic and natural attractions that could all be real tourism hotspots, Lebanon according to Sardouk holds about 190 sites of archeological and cultural interest, many of which are not yet incorporated into the tourism infrastructure. Add to that the country’s human capital and you maximize the power of the destination that might even open up even more untapped niche sectors.

“Among European cultural tourists, many are old and lonely,” said Hobeika. “I have seen seniors who left Lebanon with tears in their eyes and said they would never forget us. They didn’t feel lonely here.” Surely that is incentive enough.
 

This summer, Lebanon is riding on a wave of inbound tourism that is, by local standards, monumental. For the first time in recent memory, the month of June saw more than 100,000 arriving visitors. In relation to June 2003, the upward jump amounted to 37.43 % from 97,273 to 133,678 visitors, translating into a 26.4% share of the total 506,367 arrivals recorded for the first half of 2004. And while this increase was by far the largest year-on-year tourism growth for the month of June in a long time, the even better news is that growth rates in other months of this year were more flabbergasting still. In the first half-year of 2004, three out of six months recorded higher percentage wise increases than June: April (106.81%), March (77.16%), May (46.35%), plus January (35.34%) following not far behind.

For the industry, this means a double positive evolution of increasing and more balanced business as the summertime bulge in inbound tourism is becoming less extreme. “The figures for 2004 show a flattening of the curve between high and low seasons. The rise in tourism figures is consistent and very good for the country,” Nada Sardouk, general director at the ministry of tourism, told EXECUTIVE. In line with the good performance of the first six months, she confirmed that the ministry anticipates a total visitor count topping 1.3 million for this year.

The ministry’s optimism reverberates on the ground. From Bhamdoun to Broumana, the summer resort towns above Beirut saw business shift from zero to vibrant several weeks earlier than last year. The up market hotels that are the usual suspects for doing top business in Beirut confirm that occupancy has approached 100% since the beginning of July. And while Saudi Arabia’s new ambassador to Lebanon estimated in a welcomed message that more than 200,000 of the kingdom’s citizens (and coveted spenders) would vacation in Lebanon this year, arrivals of holidaymakers coming from outside the region also show new promise.

According to industry insiders, regional arrivals improved during the phase of changed travel patterns triggered by September 11 but many European tourists stayed away in 2002 and 2003. From this spring, however, the numbers of cultural tourists from Europe increased healthily and also started to include more people of younger age, where in previous years the “junior” in a tour group would often be 65.

Compared to previous years, while visitor numbers of one million per year marked a 2003 watershed and a 1974 visitor count of 1.48 million has again and again been quoted as the benchmark and the number to beat, the summer of 04 thus looks great. It seems a very fitting moment to pause and take stock of the larger potential, the up- and downsides of tourism for Lebanon, through an assessment of its macro-economic role and relevant public and private sector strategies.

On a worldwide scale, tourism is the fastest growing economic sector in two crucial respects: job creation and foreign exchange earnings, according to the World Tourism Organization (WTO), an agency of the United Nations. But although journeying has been called a human compulsion and universal drive since the first members of the human race embarked on migrations across deserts, oceans and mountain ranges, the career of tourism as a significant component in national economies has been more recent than the ascendancy of activities such as manufacturing, trade, finance, and transportation.

Tourism as a modern activity (in its definition as ‘travel for leisure,’ the term has been used officially for less than 80 years) has changed greatly from its beginnings as an elite pastime of wealthy young Britons who from the 18th century onward roamed Mediterranean destinations to escape their dreadful native climate and cuisine, and who greatly enlarged their cultural knowledge and art collections in the process. This elite phenomenon was the prototype of today’s cultural and leisure tourism and also soon came to include health tourism.

Tourism became less the preserve of the elite in the mid to late 19th century through organized mass travel but it really invigorated the economic equation of tourism in the second half of the 20th century. It brought the expansion of leisure journeys into a service used heavily by average income earners in industrial countries.

From a Lebanese perspective, it must appear sadly ironic that the year 1975 – when visitor numbers here came crashing down – is used as the international reference point for the sector’s rise to a new level and the unfolding of massive growth as worldwide tourist numbers broke the barrier of 200 million persons. From 1975 until 2000, this number of tourists tripled and for the coming 15 years, the WTO (which held its first general assembly as an UNDP agency in 1975) estimates another increase to 1.56 billion international tourist arrivals worldwide in 2020. Published in a report titled, Tourism2020 Vision, just before the turn of the millennium, the WTO prognoses calculated global tourism growth at 4.1% annually between 1995 and 2020 based on input from national tourism authorities and global industry leaders. The WTO’s regional forecast for the Middle East presents an even substantially higher outlook of 7.1% annual growth to reach 68.5 million tourist arrivals in 2020. Under this prediction, the Middle East’s share of international tourist arrivals would double over the study’s 25-year period from 2.2% in 1995 to 4.4% of the world total in 2020. However, a new WTO series of short-term assessments of sector developments, called the World Tourism Barometer, showed in its latest edition published in June that the Middle East achieved 30.4 million international tourist arrivals in 2003 (an increase of 10.3% from 2002), already representing a 4.4% share of the world’s 694 million tourist travels. According the findings of the report, Lebanon’s recent tourism boom is fully congruent with developments in the region and beyond. And assuming a 7.1% annual growth rate for the Middle East from this base figure, the region’s intake in tourism by 2020 could even be significantly higher than forecast in Tourism2020 Vision

The importance of tourism in global economic development in general, and the Middle East in particular, is clearly not in question. What requires examination in the macro-economic context, are the potential and strategies for Lebanese tourism relative to competing destinations and global trends on the one hand and the requirements to optimally manage tourism growth on the other hand.

Under the theme of managing tourism in global development, countries and international institutions are increasingly reviewing the link of tourism to economic, social and environmental development. A study undertaken for the World Bank concluded last year that the organization should cover the “operating environment of tourism” more strongly in its projects and country assistance strategies while carefully assessing the benefits of tourism for sustainable development. In all three respects of economic, social and environmental development, tourism growth has been shown to offer substantive benefits to national economies, but also brings with it risks and potential disadvantages.

In economic development, employment growth, increased foreign exchange earnings and heightened Foreign Direct Investment attractiveness are juxtaposed with increased infrastructure costs, inflationary pressures and the possibility of substantial outflows, or leakage, of tourism-related revenue from the economy. In its social and environmental impacts, badly managed tourism can also harm a nation’s living quality by factors such as limiting parts of the population in their access to water and energy, pushing real incomes lower, over-exploiting nature and degrading historic cultural assets.

For middle and low-income countries in the developing world, the contribution of tourism to GDP often assumes an over-proportional importance. Extreme dependency on tourism is a risk especially for small nations with marginal productivity, examples being exotic vacation islands such as the Maldives, Antigua or the Seychelles.

Whilst the country is still in the process of formulating its sustainability agenda for tourism development, Lebanon’s ministry of tourism today assumes an outlook of rapid growth in tourism of 20% and more per annum for at least the next six years. As director general Sardouk confirmed, the ministry’s best-case expectation is for 4 million tourist arrivals in 2010. This is much higher than the paltry 1.71 million tourists, which the WTO projected Lebanon to attract in that year.

Such a performance would also propel the contribution of tourism to the GDP – estimated to range at present between 8% and 10% – to levels for which the ministry today has no projections. Considering that Lebanon is part not only of the Middle East but also located in the world’s number one tourism region, the Mediterranean – which represents an expected slice of 345 million tourists in the global 2020 leisure travel cake – such an aspiration seems entirely reasonable. This is if it also makes responsible tourism development a crucial item on every private and public sector to-do-list.