The number of coaches arriving in Gibraltar has fallen consistently and significantly over the past five years. The drop has raised concerns about the health of the day-tripper market, and questions as to what lies behind it. But the Gibraltar Government insists there is nothing to worry about and that the overland tourism market is robust.

The number of coaches arriving at the Gibraltar Coach Terminal slumped by nearly 5,000 between 2000 and last year. Government figures show that in 2005 alone, just 9,805 coaches arrived at the local terminal, a 9% drop from the previous year’s total of 10,810.

A number of factors have conspired to create this decline
The Government says that a wider drop in all-inclusive tour holidays to the Costa del Sol has had a knock-on impact on Gibraltar. British holidaymakers on the Costa account for 48% of all visitors arriving on coaches, according to official statistics.

Add to that the fact that many coaches choose not to come into Gibraltar, dropping off their passengers at a free parking bay in La Linea instead.

Operators say the main reason is to avoid the border queues, though some concede they drop passengers off and then come in to Gibraltar for cheaper fuel anyway.
Either way, the recent introduction of charges at the Gibraltar Coach Terminal has perhaps only served to exacerbate the situation and add yet another reason to park in La Linea.

But fees at the terminal cannot be blamed for the sustained fall in coach numbers. The £10 entry charge was only introduced toward the end of July last year. Prior to that the Gibraltar terminal was free of charge, suggesting the reason for the drop lies elsewhere.

Tourism officials in Gibraltar are keen to generate new business, mainly because coach passengers are among the visitors who spend most money while in Gibraltar.

On average excursionists arriving on coaches spend £31.85 per person, generating important income across many sectors of the local economy. Only cruise passengers and those coming in from Spain to stay in local hotels spend more.

There is a sense among some in the tourism industry in Gibraltar that the coach problem is simply one of marketing, or rather, not enough marketing.
The Government itself seems to acknowledge this and last month unveiled plans for a new advertising campaign on the Costa.

It will pay for huge billboards along the coast to promote Gibraltar’s attractions, including of course the shopping.

In the meantime government officials, despite Opposition concerns, play down the drop in coach numbers and say the focus should be on the total number of persons crossing into Gibraltar overland.

Visitor arrivals from Spain rose nearly 2% to 7.4m last year, though that includes non-Gibraltarian frontier workers.

“The Government does not attach significance to any drop in coach arrivals at the Gibraltar Coach Terminal as does the Opposition,” said Joe Holliday, Minister for Tourism, Trade and Industry.

“The important factor is that visitor arrivals should continue to increase be it by air, sea or land.”

The Norwich and Peterborough Building Society has scooped the title of Mortgage Lender of the Year (Overseas Property) in Financial Adviser magazine’s Mortgage Awards for 2006.

The Society shares joint first place with Abbey plc. The Awards were held on 11th May 2006 at Quaglino’s restaurant in central London. Independent financial advisers nominated and voted for lenders and providers which were then judged by a panel of experts.

N&P’s local business manager for Gibraltar & Spain, Linda Cooper, told B2B: “We were absolutely thrilled to achieve this award. We are in a position to help meet the growing demand to buy overseas homes and have been helping people with Sterling mortgages in Spain for more than eight years, building on our mortgage service in Gibraltar, which was launched in 1990. Our team offers a friendly, high quality service and has good local knowledge. They should feel duly proud!”

Norwich & Peterborough have been lending on the south coast of Spain and the Costa Blanca since 1998. Staff help UK residents, ex-pats and residents of Gibraltar to buy or re-mortgage their main home, holiday property or retirement residence.

Bright vivid colours and big bold designs are the theme for the latest Pizza Hut makeover – keeping their look modern and up to the minute.

As one of the most popular restaurants in Gibraltar, Pizza Hut renews their décor every couple of years in order to refresh the look and the “experience” for customers. As a restaurant which caters particularly to parents with children it was decided unanimously by the team, to select the décor which Pizza Hut worldwide refer to as “the family design”. “Attract the kids, and they inevitably bring their parents”, says Ginny Cooper, Operations Manager “the bright and cheerful approach is something that children love”.

For 4 weeks the restaurant was stripped back to bare walls and rebuilt with new floors, wall panel graphics, ceilings, bar and a new entrance with automatic doors. The launch of the newly refurbished restaurant, was a huge success with many people turning out to view the “new look” and sample some of the old favourites and new additions to the menu.

Director John Isola said “It is important that we keep up with the times and not become complacent just because business is good, and it is important we combine a popular appearance whilst maintaining our standards.” John and Ginny have added “chicken and pepper quesadillas” and “cheese and ham crepe” and they are sure that they will be a great success.

Since Pizza Hut opened in 1990, business has never been better and during the last year 115,000 people visited the restaurant with 17,000 takeaways plus 20,000 deliveries.

The Gibraltar Tourist Board has launched a billboard and press advertising campaign all along the Costa del Sol. The campaign, which will run over the summer months, is designed to promote Gibraltar as a unique destination and a quality shopping experience.

The campaign will be followed up by the distribution of information leaflets in all major hotels on the Costa de Sol. This initiative has also been backed by a destination presentation by the Gibraltar Tourist Board to tour representatives from TUI, one of the most important inclusive-tour companies working on the coast, who are responsible for selling day trips to Gibraltar.

Gibraltar continues to be the best-selling destination for the day trip market on the Costa de Sol and the campaign is aimed at both the consumer and the travel trade. “It is important that we support the popularity that Gibraltar enjoys as a day trip destination on the Costa de Sol.

This market sector is significant for Gibraltar’s tourism industry and through this campaign we aim to ensure that Gibraltar remains at the number one slot on the day trip list.” said Joe Holliday, Tourism Minister.

Most of us in business today, be we entrepreneurs, professionals or key employees, recognise that our customers, clients and staff require us to act in their best interests and that our actions should reflect this. A code of practice or some kind of ethical standard or guideline will be needed to ensure some degree of accountability and consistency. In this we encounter the first hurdle, as the degree to which corporate and governmental governance is superimposed by regulatory bodies on business, varies between industries, businesses, professional sectors and political divides.

The effectiveness to which this is policed in reality depends on the will of those in supervision, and the willingness of those in business to conform to requirements. Many areas are of course not covered by statutory regulation and getting on with the daily running of a business requires constant decisions which often involve a degree of ethical consideration. In reality any ethical stance is at best subjective and open to subversion and expediency in the quest for profitability, which after all is the main reason for being in business in the first place.

Service providers that fail to make a profit irrespective of the quality of service that they offer will inevitably cease to be able to provide that service. But at what cost do we surrender integrity for the expediency of justifying a decision on the grounds of corporate strategy or profitability.

And at what point does adopting a rigid ethical stance become a statement of moral judgement? Moralising about the world and the problems faced by modern society has never been wise. Morality is also a subjective term, often influenced by personal experience and strongly held beliefs but not necessarily shared.

When some of the worlds most successful entrepreneurs met recently in Monaco at the invitation of the BBC World Service and the international accountants, Ernst Young, to debate how to ‘feed the starving and save the planet’, there was broad agreement that amongst most people there is a distrust of Corporate motives and scepticism of Corporate Social Responsibility, currently a trendy buzz word amongst the business elite.

Is not the sole responsibility of companies to make money? But at what cost?

Does it really matter how they make money, after all is a woman with a starving child going to refuse a plate of food because it has been purchased with money from the sale of narcotics? If we have a view against investing in armaments, are we prepared therefore to open our borders to any one who wishes to attack us for any reason, or do we wish for a society in which the strongest take all and those with weapons will be strongest?

Someone receiving a pension has strong views on the tobacco or gambling or arms production or certain drugs, and whilst they are quite happy to receive the pension income and rejoice at the level of payment, are they also prepared to self select how the investment is managed?

Business is fraught with hypocrisy in this area. Google have weakened their ethical case by caving in to the demands of China for expediency. Brands like Nike and Gap are having their reputations challenged by allegations of sweat shop labour despite spending millions on marketing a different image. Yet people still keep buying their trendy brands. Wall Mart the most successful US retailer attracts more shoppers than any other store despite allegations of a poor record of employee relations. Does anyone care? Shoppers go where they can find the best quality at the keenest price.

One can make a difference in society without trying to gain the ethical high ground or slipping into moral judgment by simply giving away something you don’t need, to those who most need it.

We have witnessed this last week two instances of philanthropists ‘walking the walk’ not just ‘talking the talk’ with Warren Buffet, one of the most successful investors of this century, donating much of his personal wealth to the Bill and Melina Gates family foundation. This injection of cash now gives the Gates Foundation around USD 30 billion, more than three times the total amount of charitable donations in the UK, putting them with Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford and John D Rockefeller, as the hitherto best known philanthropists of modern times.

A few days after the very public announcement of Warren Buffets donation, a UK hedge fund has emerged as one of the UK’s most generous philanthropists with a donation of around GBP 50m to charity assisting children in poverty.

The Investors Forum, registered in Gibraltar, was created to give a highly professional service to investors covering the wider investment process. It comprises of an association of firms and banks committed to acting professionally, whilst giving something back to those most in need.

A unique investment concept called the “Solidarity Fund” will hopefully be launched from Gibraltar, which will give both corporate and individual investors the opportunity to make money whilst directly helping those in need.

In today’s business world making a profit is essential for survival, but how we make it and what we do with it will determine what sort of people we are, and ultimately what legacy we will leave behind.

For more information on the Investors Forum or the “Solidarity Fund” please contact
Jeremy Blatch at jb@global-investors.net

The Chief Minister recently received a courtesy call from Dada Murli, senior representative of the London-based Brahma Kumaris World Spiritual University.

Dada Murli was on the Rock in connection with the United Nations Peace Day in September, and visited Peter Caruana to explain the arrangements to celebrate the international event here.

As UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan put it on the day itself last year: ‘The International Day of Peace is meant to be a day of global cease-fire, when all countries and all people stop all hostilities for the entire day. And it is a day on which people around the world observe a minute of silence at 12 noon local time. Let us pledge to do our utmost to carry out the important decisions on peace taken by last week’s 2005 World Summit.’

As before, the programme will be sponsored by The Alwani Trust. Kishin Alwani said that the Trust intends to make this an annual event in Gibraltar, and hopes that government and business offices will participate in the one-minute silence.

Main Street traders show that premises upgrades are a good investment.
Several shops in Main Street have refurbished their businesses in the last twelve months. Continuing a trend that gathered momentum with the pedestrianisation of Main Street a decade or so ago, many retail outlets have invested in new shop fronts, better display equipment and more effective lighting. The overall effect of these investments has been to offer shoppers a more contemporary shopping experience.

Customers genuinely appear to have welcomed the improvements too, but there have been other benefits which are perhaps just as important: staff morale has improved as they can see that proprietors are prepared to invest in a nicer, cleaner and more modern working environment. Also, the fresher look is drawing in new customers who had previously not visited. All in all sales are up and in some shops they have risen by double figures on a like for like basis.

The beginning of the year saw the first ladies lingerie shop open in Main Street at La Senza, franchised from the leading Canadian fashion retail group. What had been for many years a store selling table linen and materials was transformed in a matter of weeks from a somewhat tired bazaar format into a stylish retail outlet selling the latest in female garments.

BHS is another local retail franchise that invested substantial sums in early January in an extensive refit. Sarah Gray, Merchandising Manager at BHS said: “The old layout was getting pretty tired and we needed a new look to show off the many new ranges which BHS has brought in recently.”

The retail entrepreneur Philip Green bought BHS from UK group Storehouse in 2000 for £220m. Five years later the privately owned UK group is rumoured to have made more than this in pre-tax profits. Green has brought some dramatic changes in the range of clothing and other lines which the Group sells. This has benefited the Gibraltar store as well.

Sarah Gray explained other benefits of the refit, “We now have much more effective ways of displaying the new lines; the layout makes for a better and more enjoyable shopping experience. The refit has also been a booster for staff morale. They are now more conscious of the link between window promotions and in-store displays. There is a direct cause and effect: our sales are up year on year.”

Green once said that his reason for not advertising was because “We’ve got some of the best sites in the country, with millions of people walking past our shop fronts every day. What could be better than that?” BHS Gibraltar occupies one of the pre-eminent retail locations in Gibraltar at the north entrance to Main Street and so is very much in keeping with Green’s observation.

Essardas is another outlet that has invested a substantial sum in the last few months. The difference here is that the proprietors have totally changed the offering from linenware to jewellery. The premises at 15 Main Street were last refurbished forty years or so ago and much has changed since then: the border has reopened, Spain has joined the EC and the pedestrianisation of Main Street among many others. As Mr Budhrani, owner said, “We wanted to make the shop comfortable for our clients and also give our staff a better atmosphere to work in. Gibraltar is attracting a different calibre of tourist today and we wanted to offer the best shopping experience available.”

The refit, which included an extension, took around three and a half months to complete and the business had the additional challenge of running down stock levels of discontinued lines before the work could begin. Because of this the owners decided to carry out the refurbishment in the quiet first quarter of the year.

In some cases the refits have given the owners the opportunity to make better use of selling space. With the new, and in some cases expanded layouts, less money is tied up in goods that used to be stored in a stockroom out of sight of the customer. This has helped cash flow and increased stock turnover.

The investment required for these total refits is substantial but the initial signs are that it is worthwhile as trading in the new product lines show. Indeed one owner said that they were so pleased with the results that they were planning to refit other stores in their estate over the next couple of years.