While tourism may have seemed healthy, it had long been struggling, writes RUADHÁN Mac CORMACin Tunis
THE RÉSIDENCE hotel is just 40 minutes’ drive from central Tunis, but its tranquility puts it at a more distant remove from the bustle of Tunisia’s capital. The five-star hotel, in the well-off coastal town of Gammarth, has all the trappings of a luxury resort: peach-and-white walls, water fountains, a spa and a restaurant. A path through the palm trees leads directly to a secluded sandy beach.
A few guests are wandering about, but in truth the whole stretch of hotels along the waterfront feels subdued. Tunisian tourism – a vital industry that employs 400,000 people and accounts for 7 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product – is only now beginning to recover from the upheaval of the January revolution. For the first two months after president Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali was deposed, the Résidence was empty.
A similar situation prevailed elsewhere; in the first three months of the year, 40 per cent of hotel reservations were cancelled and some 15,000 jobs were lost. Some hotels started charging 25 per cent of their normal rates; the Résidence asked its 300 winter staff to defer some salary payments. “There was a bit of panic,” says Leïla Dérouiche, the hotel’s event manager. “We’re a country that’s known for tourism. Imagine all these hotels closing.” Tunisia’s tourist industry amounts to lots of beach-front hotels and little else.
Under Ben Ali’s rule, the country carved a niche for itself as the cheapest mass tourism destination on the Mediterranean. With the promise of sunshine and low-priced package deals, Europeans – including many Irish tourists – flocked to the hotels that line the most picturesque parts of the coast.
Most never left their hotel complexes, which was precisely the government’s idea. The authorities made it as difficult as possible for people to leave and mix with the locals – roads across the country are poorly signposted, GPS devices were banned and any form of independent tourism was strongly discouraged.
This was how the state addressed a paradox of its own creation: here was an insular, repressive regime paranoid about outsiders, but which opened up to mass tourism because it badly needed the money.
“It got to a point you wouldn’t believe,” says Mehdi Allani, the owner and manager of Hotel le Sultan in Hammamet, an hour south of Tunis. “The tourist zones were cleaned up and decorated with flowers, and they said, ‘There’s the tourist area. The tourist mustn’t leave here.’ And 100 metres farther along, you’d see rubbish, run-down areas and all the rest.”
Hoteliers now speak openly about how closely they were watched by the Ben Ali regime. The interior ministry, which oversaw the vast police and intelligence apparatus, had its own tourism division. Each morning, Leïla Derouiche says, plain-clothed officers would show up at the Résidence and ask to see the guest list. “If there was someone they had suspicions about, they could watch them, tap their phone . . . They might wait until that person left the hotel – they’d go up to his room and have a look around in his stuff.”
While Tunisia’s tourism industry might have appeared in rude health to visitors, the truth was that it had long been in trouble. Allani estimates that about 70 per cent of hotels have not been profitable for years, but they remained open because banks were under pressure from the government not to let them go bust for fear of damaging the country’s image. If a bank tried to sell a hotel, it might be forced to give it to a member of the ruling clan at a fraction of its market value, he adds.
Tunisia won’t abandon its cheap mass tourism, but the industry hopes the change of regime will unlock the country’s untapped potential. “It was hard for me to offer my guests anything other than a suntan,” says Allani.
“There’s so much to see in this country – we have an extraordinary cultural and natural patrimony. We always hid this.”
After the immediate post-revolution collapse, the industry hoped business would return by Easter. But then Egypt and Libya began to revolt, travel agencies grew jittery and the summer high season never came. Only recently have European tourists begun to return, and Dérouiche’s hope now is that Sunday’s elections pass peacefully and the democratic transition goes smoothly. “The revolution is here. We have done it. Now we have to put our heads down and work. If we want the revolution to succeed, we have to double our efforts.”