Alarm bells ringing all over Scotland

Alison Gray and Stephen McGinty, Scotsman, 22 September 2001

The village of Kingsbarns is a short chip from St Andrews and an ocean removed from New York. While rescuers continue to pick through the rubble of the Twin Towers, Kingsbarns residents are secure in their homes of honey-coloured brick, but the first ripples of economic instability are coming.

The telephone at the Kingsbarns Golf Links, which once rang with block bookings, instead carried a raft of cancellations. Donna Clark, the course’s administration manager, took 630 calls in just ten days, all of them wanting to cancel their reservation at the links course. The loss of business will, she admits, hit hard.

"We will have to tighten our belts, there is no doubt about that," she explains. "This will affect our prices for next season and while we are lucky enough to have a solid financial base, this is really the last thing we needed on the top of foot-and-mouth disease."

Eleven days after Peter Erskine watched the towers topple, the owner of Cambo House, a four-star Victorian mansion in Kingsbarns, has also received a number of unwelcome calls: "Many people from the US cancelled because they just could not get here, but there were many others whose confidence has been shaken in travel and who decided they just did not want to travel."

If the American market loses faith in crossing the water to play golf in Scotland, it will be a huge dent to not only the tourism industry, but also the Scottish executive, which has set such store by its golf strategy. The postponement of the Ryder Cup has practically finished the season off. Although the competition was to be held in England, many tourists were expected to fly to Scotland to play golf either before or after the event. Golf tourism brings in £100 million to Scotland every year and initial calculations show as much as £20 million could be lost.

Tackling this potential loss was top of the agenda for the leaders of VisitScotland when they met last week to decide how to minimise the damage to the trade. Operators are braced for a drop in revenue which could be just too much for those who are already reeling from foot-and-mouth disease.

Ivan Broussine, chairman of the Scottish Tourism Forum, which represents 20,000 members of the trade, said: "There is a great deal of worry out there. Most of our research is anec-dotal, but it seems cancellations from the US are rife and there is no knowing how long this could go on. Tourists from the US contribute £250 million to the Scottish economy every year and to lose a sizeable sum of that could be devastating."

A two-week celebration of British culture scheduled to take place in New York next month has since been diluted to show solidarity with the city. UK in NY - supported by the British Council and BA among others - has been renamed UK with NY but plans to showcase Scottish art, music, literature and culture as part of the conference have been shelved.

Many tourism leaders see maintaining direct trans-atlantic flight links to Scotland as the crucial issue. A planned Continental service from Newark, New Jersey, to Edinburgh - the Scottish airport’s first direct link to the US - looks certain to be scrapped as the company makes huge cutbacks. There are fears that Glasgow services could follow suit.

Only when figures are released in October 11 will staff know how air travel has been affected, but anecdotally, busy car parks, crowded concourses, tourists and travellers appear to have bounced back after last week’s long delays.

"You should not read that Glasgow will be affected, but it is a possibility," admitted Nick Britten, the director of corporate communications for Continental.

The nearest comparison to this downturn was the Gulf War in 1990-1 which triggered the recession of the early Nineties. VisitScotland is using this model in an attempt to plot the damage to the nation’s tourism economy. Then US visitors fell by 22 per cent, tourist revenues by £50 million and while the overall number of visitors fell by just 9 per cent, the industry took two years to bounce back and five years to begin to grow.

A spokeswoman for VisitScotland said: "We will have to look at reworking our strategy, perhaps increasing our spend in countries like Spain, Italy and Sweden which are not traditional markets for us, because there is no doubt that there are going to be far fewer Americans travelling."

Overseas visitors account for 17 per cent of visitor numbers, but 30 per cent of the spend. Now tourist chiefs will be looking towards the 83 per cent of visitors from within the UK.

More Scots will be encouraged to visit their own country. Customers visiting IKEA’s new multi-million-pound store in Braehead this weekend will be met by a stand run by VisitScotland to promote its Autumn Gold campaign of short weekend breaks.

Professor Stephen Page, who specialises in tourism at Stirling University, feels the industry could bounce back. "There is enormous potential here for Scotland to promote itself as a safe, welcoming environment for domestic tourism," he said. "Doing this would allow VisitScotland to plug the gaps in volume, but they would not be able to plug the gap in revenue. The comfort is that tourism does recover from knocks relatively quickly ."

The crisis is also causing concern in the hospitality industry. Lynn Murphy, senior vice-chairman of the Greater Glasgow Hoteliers Association, admitted the phones are not ringing as much as expected and there have been a "small amount" of cancellations.

Ms Murphy, general manager of the City Inn, said: "What we lose in international visitors we may make up with British visitors. The natural pick-up you expect at this time of year is not there. There is a nervousness but we will have to wait and see."

Each year, conferences pump over £100 million into the economy and last week’s tragedy took place during Glasgow’s biggest event of the year. There was not a hotel room to be had as 10,000 delegates descended for the European Association of Diabetics event, including as many as 1,000 from the US .

There are also fears of damage to restaurants. Gordon Yuill, who now runs his own restaurant, was manager of Rogano, Glasgow’s celebrated fish restaurant, during the Gulf War and subsequent recession. "Americans just stopped coming ," he said. "People who previously dined twice a week you were lucky to see once a month. We are already starting to see a drop off."