Barbara Millar
They couldn’t afford to send her to Aviemore
In 2002, after two years of hard study, I qualified as a Blue Badge tourist guide in Scotland. The course was rigorous, demanding – and enjoyable (and expensive), but getting the badge was a culmination of a long-held desire to work more directly with people, after over 20 years of freelance journalism largely conducted in comparative isolation from my spare bedroom.
As a tourist guide I am self-employed: no regular monthly salary, no employer contributions to a pension, no work-no pay, and absolutely no job security. I am also at the sharp end of tourism, one of the biggest ‘industries’ in Scotland. I interact with the tourists themselves – those who have spent their hard-earned cash coming to visit our country and who rightly demand to have a good, value-for-money time. And I am only ever as good as my last job – word gets around quickly in this small country: if I don’t deliver a good customer experience every time, I can soon expect the work to dry up.
Which brings me neatly to our national tourism agency: VisitScotland. The agency chaired by Mike Cantlay, revealed in an issue of SR last week to be in receipt of £24,000 per annum for that role. I don’t know how many onerous days he has to put in to pocket that generous sum, but I’m glad VS can afford it. Because, just a couple of weeks ago, I was told that it couldn’t afford to pay me £600 – yes, you’ve read it correctly, I haven’t missed any zeros from the figure – for three days’ driver guiding work.
As in almost every interaction I’ve had with VisitScotland, the approach was last-minute. I was phoned on Wednesday 29 September and asked if I was free that weekend, to take a party of journalists around Aviemore and its environs. I was free – well, once I’d cancelled an optician’s appointment and lunch with a friend – and accepted the job. I then submitted a note of my fee so that I could be furnished with a purchase order.
VisitScotland likes guides to provide services on the cheap. The agency has long exhorted us (self-employed, no monthly salary, no pension etc etc) to quote a reduced rate on the grounds that we will be working with travel agents or tour operators (who will, hopefully, be bringing customers into the country some time in the future which might, at some time in the future, mean work for us) or journalists (who will, hopefully, write something nice about their freebie to Scotland which might, at some time in the future, mean customers will visit, which might, at some time in the future, mean work for us). You get the gist – all very nebulous stuff.
But most of us guides go along with it. My normal rate for driver guiding (in my own, insured vehicle, at a time of rising diesel costs) is between £250-£300 a day. The job was for three full days and I offered to do it for VS for £600, hardly a king’s ransom. I expected to get my purchase order number the next day – but nothing appeared. When, by 4pm on the day before I was due to pick up the group, I still hadn’t heard anything, I telephoned the ‘executive’ who had booked me. Ah, she said, we can’t afford you any more.
It transpired that another journalist wanted to join the tour and his or her flight from Dublin was going to ‘bust the budget’. The exec was going to have to hire a car herself and do the tour originally handed to a professional guide, even though, as she admitted to me, she didn’t ‘really know the roads’. What impression might that give to these journalists? It didn’t fill me with a great deal of hope that those of us at the sharp end of the tourism industry would be welcoming large numbers of customers on the basis of what these particular scribes might pen.
The day that I learned my modest £600 fee had ‘bust’ the VS budget was the day that the Herald revealed that Rosyth-Zeebrugge ferry service had benefited to the tune of a staggering £3.9 million in marketing support from the self-same agency. The service, run by private operator DFDS, was supported by public cash through advertising, promotions and direct marketing – but DFDS then promptly pulled the plug on its passenger operations. So, no customers being brought into the country via that route – yet £3.9m of taxpayer funds wasted, courtesy of VisitScotland.
And this news did not come long after the revelations that the former chief executive of VS Philip Riddle, had waltzed off into the sunset (or another job), clutching a golden goodbye cheque for £127,000 plus a payment of £113,000 into his pension pot. And now we know that chairman Dr Cantlay is on £24,000 a year (plus the sums he receives from other quango appointments).
Yet, so I was told, my modest £600 fee ‘blew the budget’. It is to be hoped that, sometime soon, a long, hard look is taken at VisitScotland and at how well – or not – it supports a tourist industry considered to be one of the major strengths of Scotland.
Barbara Millar is a journalist specialising in health issues