No More Wine and Roses - 02 May 2003

Last Monday there arrived in Las Vegas, Nevada, a thousand men and women for a special, you might say an emergency, convention.

There were professionals for whom most of the past 20 years had been days of wine and roses - no more. No more.

They were the managers of a thousand tourist agencies throughout the United States. They're in a bad way.

Las Vegas - it doesn't seem many years since I first came upon Las Vegas on my first motor trip across the United States.

My companion was a Scottish parson, who was also on a fellowship from the same American philanthropic foundation.

He was at Chicago University, studying Semitics - the early languages into which the Bible was translated.

He was an affable and easy-going companion and when I say that a little later that summer I had to bail him out of a village prison in Mexico for having had a spoonful too many of a native potion called Pisco Punch you'll gather, quite rightly, that his professional piety did not intrude on our more rollicking adventures.

One of the requirements of this two-year fellowship must have been unique in the way that such things work.

You were required not to stay in your university town when the first academic year ended but to spend the summer having first bought a second hand car, which I did for $45, and drive through as many of the then 48 states as you could manage.

It was, it turned out, the most rewarding requirement of the fellowship, especially since apart from enjoying the great variety of landscape, two young men in their middle 20s were jolted into a recognition of what life for most people was like in a great nation in the pit of the Great Depression.

When we came into Las Vegas it was a dusty western town of a few thousand.

We bedded down in what was called a motor court - a rudimentary motel - half a dozen cabins with a roofed spaced in between to park your car.

There was one outdoor shower. I went to bed feeling like a pioneer on a simple wooden bed under the thoughtful gaze, on the adjoining wall, of a couple of cockroaches the size of mice.

Not to worry, I'd learned already from another fellow who was an insect expert that the cleanest insect known to man is the cockroach. Also, by the way, he's immune to radiation.

So after the final bomb it could well be that the cockroaches, along with the dolphins - the other radiation-defying species - will take over.

Well, Las Vegas. Let me just end this depressing description by saying that in 1933 the town's shabby baseball park seated 3-400 people on a great day. And that its chamber of commerce, housing the town's public boosters, was a one-storey stucco building. We didn't stay long.

Three years later Franklin Roosevelt saw to it that a great dam was built in the desert with the largest reservoir in the world.

It drew on the mighty power of the Colorado River, the one you see from a mile above gushing through the bed of the Grand Canyon.

The result was to endow the small towns of Arizona and Nevada and Las Vegas, in particular, with all the water they could need.

And the long-run result, as a million tourists will testify, is that today at night the bright lights of Las Vegas's pleasure domes advertise a gleaming Babylon in the desert.

One of the downtown hotels alone consumes as much electricity as the houses in a town of 60,000.

Las Vegas has become the Mecca of tourists from all over the world. The big hotels are so designed as to make you believe that you're living in ancient Rome or overlooking Niagara Falls.

The one that housed the melancholy thousand travel managers is a not-so-tacky, in fact a remarkable facsimile of the centre of Venice.

It was, in any case, brave and ironical that it should be there that last Monday there came together a convention of the men and women who coax the tourists, accommodate the tourists, live by the tourists and are now on bended knee imploring their old customers to become tourists again.

They've had a hard time for the past 19 months, since the fateful 11 September.

This week's meeting started by taking a poll of those present.

What was their prime anxiety? The near-bankruptcy of the great airlines? The resistance of the airline pilots and flight attendants to cuts deeper in salaries and pensions and working time than the ones they've already accepted? The huge cost of the new security precautions? International terrorism?

No, it was Sars - the respiratory disease that first erupted in a small town in China last November and which the Chinese authorities for too long claimed to be a small affliction they could handle.

Since the September catastrophe, when too many Americans decided that flying anywhere had become hazardous, the near-collapse of the domestic tourist business was offset by an actual increase in tourism to South-East Asia.

Americans and Europeans who decided to give New York and other American playgrounds a wide berth knew that al-Qaeda had little cause to bomb the Great Wall of China or the pleasure haunts of Bangkok or Shanghai.

But since the disclosure of Sars in China and Hong Kong, the World Health Organisation and several governments discouraged or prohibited travel to South-East Asia and then, so help us, to Toronto, Canada.

The president of the Las Vegas convention said that the effect of this warning had resulted in "instant deterioration of the airline and the tourist industries."

The mood of the conventioneers was not lightened by the sight on the evening news shows of meetings of big corporation men who'd cancelled their flights to the hotels of the Asian capitals and were holding their convention by satellite.

On the following Tuesday morning the papers were full of panic street riots in Beijing - a chaos of protestors, some wanting more precautions, some wanting fewer.

While the Las Vegas thousand were meeting there was another meeting here of the officers and four or five union leaders grimly facing each other as the world's biggest airline teetered on the verge of bankruptcy and was seeking the protection under the law of what we now call restructuring.

This has become the almost standard salvation of the airlines - a cry of SOS to which it was assumed the government would respond by jumping in and bailing them out.

The government, with its enormous deficit and much more to come from resettling Iraq has said, "No, no more".

The alternative was for the "American" - the airline company - American's unions to back down still further - to lower salaries still, to work longer hours and in the offing widely extend their duties.

That's a fuzzy way to express the drastic change that probably alone can save American and United, which is already in bankruptcy.

What it means is this: cut out much of your passenger service and imitate the new Eastern airline called Jet Blue, which was a midget only five or six years ago, doing local New England hops.

Today the expert calculation is that it and the West Coast's South Western airline might come very soon to take care of 40% of all air travel in the United States.

So, as they say in New York - what's to copy?

If you ask a regular traveller on Jet Blue they will tell you the solution is simple - why don't the big airlines stop catering to the pampered old dot coms - the rock stars and the celebrities, who've learned to expect attendance better suited to a rich and famous hospital patient than a hardy simple fellow who wants to go from here to there and is quite happy to nibble a cheese straw and drink a Coke?

Essentially that's true. Jet Blue, even from New York to San Francisco, serves no meals - just a free soft drink and a potato chip or two.

One humbling example of reform. Until now, when your plane lands at Kennedy Airport say, and you take your luggage off the rack and leave the plane and a squad of cleaners comes aboard and takes care of all the trash - papers, tissue, cottons et cetera - that have accumulated over the journey. On Jet Blue the flight attendant tells you to take everything and he/she does a quick search to see that all the garbage has gone.

The big airlines are going to have to cancel the cleaning service and threaten two other unions that have helped heat up the food, serve the menus that in first class and business class offer a menu with a choice of entrees and deserts and would you prefer a modest French cabernet or a merlot from Oregon or a truly impressive California claret?

Even with a hot meal in coach we have lived in a fairy land for too long.

Three unions who laboured on our behalf are going to have to disband or fire most of their staff. Pilots and flight attendants may have to face the ultimate austerity - to have their pay reduced to the Jet Blue level, which is less than half a regular salary.

At best this dramatic reform will entail adding at least another quarter million to the fast rising army of the unemployed.

Just to turn the knife in the wound, for all airlines, the price of airline fuel - which has always cost the earth - had doubled since 11 September.

My wife and I, riffling through a lifetime of such taken-for-granted perks, repeated what F Scott Fitzgerald said in the bleak dawn of the Depression: "We had the best of it."

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

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