Novelty of using Sars as a scapegoat is wearing off
YOU HAVE UNDOUBTEDLY heard of the term scapegoat. It comes from the Book of Leviticus in the Bible - once a year the priest takes a goat, puts his hands on it to blame everyone's sins on it and then sends it off into the wilderness, blame assigned the easy way.
But that is all so distant and long ago. We need a new metaphor. What about adopting severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) instead? We already blame far more on it than it deserves, very convenient, just the thing.
Take for instance the lead story in the weekly Property section of this newspaper yesterday - Tourist-starved hotels up far sale. Five hotels, we are told, are to be put up for sale. Our story did not say that Sars was the reason. But on first impression, we had a Sars casualty.
It strikes me that one of those hotels, and I will not tell you which, might still find that scapegoat useful. It has long had a name as a . . . shall we say . . . ahem . . . 'trysting rendezvous'. Hotel indeed. I would not have been surprised at one time to hear it had meters installed on the bedposts in its guest rooms. But, of more importance, it also strikes me the owners of all five are in deep financial difficulties that long predated the outbreak of Sars. What we have here seems to be a case of banks wanting assets sold to recover some of their money, nothing to do with Sars at all.
Even if it were, I do not think hotels are yet best described as 'tourist-starved'. On a forced diet perhaps, skipped a meal, a bit hungry, but nothing to compare with famine-struck kids in Africa. If the present difficulties facing hotels cause their prices to decline, then I think their buyers will congratulate themselves for many years to come on the timing of their purchases.
Look at the first chart of the number of visitor arrivals to Hong Kong over the past 20 years. I doubt there is a record of tourism growth anywhere in the world to match it. Yes, that line will go down as figures later come in for the period of the Sars outbreak but have a little confidence in Hong Kong, O ye of little faith. Find me anyone five years ago who forecast the massive upswing in visitors we have since enjoyed. All the things that led to it are still in place.
And look at the second chart on Hong Kong's average hotel occupancy rate over the past 25 years. The biggest downturns are clearly related to recessions with general financial causes, not to shock impacts such as Sars, and the latest available figure, 84.5 per cent, happens to be almost exactly the average of the past 25 years. Yes, that occupancy rate will now go down but, if you want to know what down means, look at the blue line, which gives you my calculation of the weighted average occupancy rate of Asian hotels outside China and Japan.