Acute amnesia?

I have come to the conclusion that the minority favouring the hotel are suffering from acute amnesia.

They keep asking the same question over and over again, and when someone replies they just ignore the answer and ask all over again or make a statement that has already been countered.

First of all, lets clear this up once and for all. This is not "our" hotel. Group tours from China will not be staying in "our" hotels, they will be staying in the Chinese five-star hotel with attached restaurants, souvenir shops and other services.

Everything inside the hotel will be owned by the hotel and the group tourists will be herded to the hotel owned shops, just as they do in other areas.

These group tours never shop in the supermarket and always hardly spend any money locally. Who stays in a five-star hotel and goes shopping in the supermarket?

After the group tour has eaten and shopped in the hotel, they will make their way onto coaches that are also owned by the same business and leave Dunedin. They will not take taxis, local buses or mix with anyone. And most certainly they will not eat in local restaurants.

Once again: the people who really contribute to our local economy directly are individual travellers, families, friends and small trekking groups etc.
They all go to the supermarket, stay in local accommodation and mix with everyday Kiwi's. What they spend stays here and helps us just grow a wee bit more. We should be thinking about this market in terms of how to expand it and include more services.

I have worked in hospitality for 16 years and I know the system back to front. If you work in the tourism industry for as long as I have, you get to know the spenders from the tire kickers.

I have a lot of mates that would bet their bottom dollar on what I have typed and some of them have been in the industry all their lives.

The Chinese tour groups are especially well known to have sown all the loose ends up - there is no surplus money. Some Asian group tours even include souvenirs so the people don't even shop locally, they just look at the brochure and tick the box.

Let's get real.