As an industry that, in the main, delivers an intangible product, tourism success can only be measured on the volume of business, repeat business and revenue generated.
Domestically, as everyone will confirm, holiday taking by British citizens in the UK is down and continues to be on the slide.
Some might argue that the lure of the Costa’s, Greek Islands, theme parks of Orlando etc provide an irresistible choice.
Others comment on the quality and fabric of the domestic tourism infrastructure itself.
What most seem to have missed is the, frankly, shoddy attention to detail and levels of service, before the customer even travels.
Our national, regional and local tourism authorities spend millions of pounds promoting their local areas, giving a multitude of reasons to visit, extolling the many and varied attractions of why we should remain at home when considering a holiday or short break.
The vast majority of these huge sums of money is woefully wasted by the inadequacies of the product providers ie those so-called commercial partners in the tourism make-up.
Over the last few years, we have undertaken numerous mystery shopper exercises on behalf of national, regional and local tourism bodies.
It does not matter whether you are Scottish, Welsh or English, the fact of the matter is, most of the businesses we surveyed rated from disappointing to poor.
Of the many and varied horror stories, we have guest houses that have answer phones that do not take messages and businesses that never ask where we had heard of them (so how can they criticise tourist boards for not generating sleeper nights).
Some 30% never bother to respond to requests for simple tariffs/information and, more worryingly, no-one bothers to follow up.
Now to put these into the context of the industry, there can be little point in our tourist boards spending those millions of pounds when the visitor, encouraged to book from the guide, receives little, poor, or no service.
Maybe the time has come for classification and grading to be taken to the marketing level?
Establishments that wish to advertise in official tourist board guides must have at least attended a quality marketing seminar for the tourismindustry.
After all, four crowns (or is it stars or diamonds these days?) is meaningless if the receptionist doesn’t bother to send requested literature,handles the request rudely or fails to deliver any form of promise.