Comparing Travel Clips: Bharat and Chota

And one by our leading hotel groups.

Hotel Boss Believes in Mauritian Talent

Meet Jean-Michel Pitot CEO of the Attitude hotel group. They are making a profit, they have an occupancy rate 10% higher than average and the right attitude. Pitot also understands that cost is not everything. Nope. It's a combination of several factors. He also believes Mauritius got talent in all layers of management.

But he is not against all-inclusive packages and doesn't believe that air access is a show-stopper. Overall, quite refreshing to read.

Should We Prefer One Type of Tourists Over Another?

This is a long-standing debate: some say we should only get the cream of the crop while others are perfectly comfortable with all kinds of tourists visiting Mauritius.

What are your views?

How Well Are We Managing the H1N1 Flu?

I'm no expert in virus propagation but I understand that this thing is spreading quite quickly: number of cases doubled from 14 to 29 in less than a week. And out of the 1,462 deaths recorded worldwide far too many have happened here. The other big question I have is whether that one Rs4.3 million machine that's testing 12 people a day is enough for the size of population we have given the number of tourists that visit us, the speed at which it is spreading and the size of our territory. Shouldn't we get more machines to test more citizens in time? We are after all a quarter-trillion-rupee economy.

The other thing I don't understand is why some kind of x-ray machine is not installed at the airport and at the port so that infected people are detected and stopped before they spread it around. Finally, has some exhaustive data analysis been carried out to figure out from where carriers are coming from and where it has spread on our island?

More Space Will Make Us Better Than Singapore

So said Ramgoolam last week. While it's a fact that Mauritius is 2.86 times bigger than Singapore (2,030 square kilometres vs. 710.2 square kilometres for the Asian Tiger) they use their space infinitely better than we do. For example, let's consider the number of tourists in 2008: we welcomed 930,456 of them while they got 10.12 million. Hmm, that works out to about 458 tourists per square kilometre for us and a staggering 14,243 for them. That is they had 31 times more visitors per square kilometre than us.

He also doesn't want us to believe that nepotism is the only route to a job in Mauritius. Can he then tell us how many routes are there to become Chief Executives of Air Mauritius and Mauritius Telecom and Financial Secretary?

Tourists Target Not Blazing New Trails

The 2015 target of 2 million tourists means increasing the 761,063 arrivals we got in 2005 by a factor of 2.63 or if you prefer by a little over 10% annually for 10 straight years. This has happened in 5 of the last 22 10-year periods ending December 2007 with the last one occurring for the decade ending December 1996. The average of these 10-year growth factors is 2.27 so that if an average history were to repeat itself we would hit that 2 million mark a little later, sometime in 2017. A few seconds after 13h45 on Friday October 11 to be more precise.