Andrea Jennings ended her stormy tenure as director of The Coco Reef Hotel with appropriately fierce criticism of the state of Bermuda tourism and the failure of the Island to put the customer first.

It would be tempting but wrong to dismiss her criticisms, especially given her well-documented run-ins with staff and others since she took over the management of the former Stonington Beach Hotel.

That's because the criticisms contain at least a germ of truth, and her declaration that the customer must come first is irrefutable.

The sad truth is that does not always happen in Bermuda, as the recent scathing criticism of the Island's service levels in the Daily Mail in Britain showed.

Ms Jennings stated in her letter to owner John Jefferis that the ability of the Coco Reef to host large groups and functions was hampered by the refusal of staff to make the extra effort, and that too rings true.

One of the problems at Coco Reef was that when it was the Stonington Beach Hotel, it perpetually lost money and in some ways was allowed to do so because of its supposed function as a training hotel.

When the Bermuda College gave up the hotel, it gave up that idea too, and Ms Jennings rightly had to find ways to make the property viable.

This is the same challenge that every hotel manager in Bermuda has had in Bermuda for the last 20 years and the fact that the Island has lost thousands of hotel rooms in that time is testament to the problem.

But that does not mean, as Ms Jennings asserted, that Bermuda tourism is a sinking ship or is dead in the water. There are hotel properties, large and small, that have either been successful for years or that have turned the corner.

What they have in common is strong management, employees, many of them long-standing, who understand that the customer must come first, and constant efforts to innovate and improve their products.

That is the model that Bermuda needs to adopt across the board. For too long, there has been complacency, including a dependence on the mythical and exaggerated friendliness of Bermudians and a failure to truly improve the Island's product.

That has been less true in the last few years as employers, employees, the Government and others have belatedly realised that the industry is, if not sinking,m then leaking.

Tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars have been spent on improving hotels and labour relations are vastly improved over the 1980s and 1990s.

But too often, service remains poor and the Island lacks the kinds of facilities and entertainment that are commonplace elsewhere. And, in spite of the efforts of Tourism Minister Ewart Brown, it is still expensive to get to the Island and equally expensive to stay here.

Even the owners of those properties that are successful will tell you that tourism in Bermuda remains a tough business.

There needs to be a real effort to control costs and to pass the savings on to the customer and to raise standards of service. It only takes one bad experience for a visitor spending hundreds of dollars a night on a hotel room, taxis and the like to never return.

That, in essence, is what Ms Jennings was saying, and she was right.