Welsh Journals

Fewer than 20 per cent of our visitors ever take touring holidays through Wales. Perhaps they think there is all too little incentive for them to do so. I am not so concerned about the overseas visitors, welcome though they are. I am interested in the 3,900,000 British people who come to Wales. In fact the Welsh Tourist and Holiday Board funds would be much better devoted to selling Wales to the rest of the British. Let the British Tourist Holiday Association promote our funny hats and harps overseas. What can we do about making Wales as a whole a more successful holiday ground? How can we spread the prosperity more evenly,-and also increase it? Obviously we do not want to become as meticulous and mercenary as the Swiss, where even a small village innkeeper has a terrifyingly efficient sense of tourist values. But we could take quite a few leaves out of their book. The Swiss are serious-minded about their tourists. They give them value for money at the same time as demanding their pound of flesh. I suspect that many Welsh hoteliers and land- ladies are only interested in the pound of flesh. There is, for one thing, an appalling lack of comfort in Welsh travel. To enjoy some of the off the beaten track beauties in Wales you have to be either a Spartan, someone on a diet, or a fugitive escaping from the law. Why, oh why, are most Welsh hotels such gloomy, cheerless places? Why are the bedrooms so cell-like, cold and full of such ghastly furniture? Why does the receptionist have such a frosted expression as she signs you in, hands over the key-and promptly forgets all about you? People may say that this indifference is a national British characteristic, but I am only concerned here with Wales. Not only foreigners but people in England imagine that Wales, other than Snowdonia, is a vast dismal landscape dominated by colliery winding engines and brooded over by a perpetual Welsh Sunday gloominess. A little more comfort in hotel reception rooms and bedrooms, a little more honest friendliness by the management, making you feel you are welcome and that they are there to help you not vice-versa, would go a long way towards dispelling this wide- spread illusion. But we need many more hotels to be built-and motels too-if we're to cope with our tourist traffic in a modern and civilised way. And the food. Only 36 out of nearly 750 recommended hotels and restaurants in Britain listed in the Good Food Guide are in Wales.