Wassup Bermuda! I hit on a hot topic last week tourism which was addressed by another writer. Last week we were looking at how standards have dropped and we allow young people to do whatever the heck they want. We also looked at how some of them behave in hotels. What we didn’t say, is that hotels in Bermuda are struggling and have lowered their standards by allowing classless persons to frequent their establishments.Our hotels are trying to make a dollar and I for one am a proponent of marketing to locals to fill periods of low demand. But unless the locals act right, the standards will drop and the high roller who doesn’t mind spending the premium prices in the hotel’s restaurants and bars will stop coming to Bermuda.There is a way to do this right. The Bermudians we want staying in hotels and interacting with our visitors are the Bermudians with true ‘game’ or ‘Bermuda Swag’ and there are still many of us who possess this charm.It’s tough being a hotelier in Bermuda. The cost of doing business is higher than other places with which you are forced to compete and whose prices you are being asked by the industry to match.So the hotel decides to target locals at specific times of the year and for specific promotions. I agree with this. But the problem is that some Moes don’t know how to act! Granted, if a person rents a room, they are entitled to use it as they wish; but the use must be lawful and consistent with the hotel’s rules, policies and procedures.Some people think that a hotel is a brothel house! Sorry, not the case. Many persons book hotel rooms for this purpose but I am here to tell you that if you wish to stay in a hotel, there is a certain code of conduct that is expected, especially if the hotel wishes to be able to say that it is a four-star hotel.Bermuda has lost some 40 hotels, guest houses and cottage colonies over the past 30 years and we have to protect the few that remain; otherwise we may as well pack it in and say forget being in the tourism business.We can’t have locals smoking weed in hotel rooms whilst we are trying to market ourselves as a premium tourism destination. We can’t have Bermudians running around hotels in do-rags, being loud and disorderly, disrupting other guests and making hotels that want to be four-star properties look like two- or three-star hotels or the projects! I’m sorry, we just cannot do that. It is not a sustainable business model.We can and should have classy locals frequenting hotels; people who have the disposable income to afford a night or two or dinner at a hotel without blinking an eye. We want visitors to rub shoulders with Bermudians who have some ‘game’, some class, some swag and who can speak to them intelligently about our beautiful Island home.But we don’t want our visitors to have to encounter people who are negative, who have nothing positive to say about anything, nothing intelligible to share, who engage in crime and/or antisocial behaviour, who have no class, no game, no Bermuda Swag.What you don’t want is the person who is scraping together a few pennies for a room, doesn’t realise that there are taxes and gratuities on top of the room rate and creates a scene at checkout or cannot pay their bill! That’s cheap, cheesy and classless. That individual would be better served by saving that money and spending it on an education; because an education will put them in a space later on in life wherein they will have more disposable income and will be able to afford to stay in hotels and dine in restaurants.I always tell people that Bermuda does not produce much in the way of industrial or manufacturing nations. However, we do produce some really cool people. That has always been our ace in the hole; our people. We need to get back to that, because if we have Bermudians with what I now call that traditional Bermuda Swag, promoting our Island, working in our industry, interacting with our visitors, we will be able to back up all the marketing that is being done by the Bermuda Department of Tourism.Because of the way things have changed, with the increase in crime, the murders and the high incidence of guest workers working in the industry and thus interacting with visitors, we have lost our way and have not really and truly been delivering on the messages that our marketing initiatives are sending.I love my guest worker colleagues who work in the industry and as long as Bermudians don’t want jobs in the tourism industry or turn their noses down at such positions; we will always need them. However, I have to believe that a more authentic Bermuda experience is delivered by Bermudians. Who better to sell Bermuda than Bermudians? But we need the Bermudians with that good old fashioned Bermuda Swag, whether they work directly in the tourism industry or not! I am asking them to please stand up, come forward and be a part of the revitalisation of our tourism industry! Peace ... DJLT