Opinion | Go back to original Kai Tak plans to fix cruise terminal transport fiasco

The scenes of tourists waiting in long queues for taxis are a public relations disaster decades in the making

Deviating from the project’s original plans and delaying needed infrastructure have hurt terminal operations, and this must be fixed quickly

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Passengers load their bags into a taxi at the Kai Tak Cruise Terminal on August 9. The terminal operator has called for more robust transport options to accommodate cruise passengers after reports of long queues of people waiting for taxis. Photo: Sam Tsang

Published: 3:45pm, 13 Aug 2023

“If a picture paints a thousand words...”, wrote David Gates of the pop group Bread in 1971. Unsurprisingly, it was a hit for the band. Such powerful imagery explains why most languages have a similar expression and concept: words, spoken or written, do not have the same impact.

That is why the recent images of well-heeled tourists queuing outside the Kai Tak Cruise Terminal waiting for a taxi sparked such a strong reaction. Within days, the government had convened an urgent, high-level meeting to establish what went wrong and what could be done about it.

After all, it doesn’t matter how many good stories there are about Hong Kong or how well we tell them, the local and overseas media will always be on the lookout for a negative one, especially if there is a good picture to back it up. The truth is this has been a public relations fiasco just waiting to happen for more than a decade.

For me, the story began in May 1999 when – much to everyone’s surprise, including my own – I was appointed as Hong Kong’s first commissioner for tourism. I was already a director in the Financial Secretary’s Office, the schedule of which had recently been expanded to include negotiations with the Walt Disney Company.

The first step was to set up a tourism strategy group to bring together the big beasts of the industry and thrash out some ideas. One that emerged early on was a proposal for a purpose-built, world-class cruise terminal to manage the larger vessels rather than the smaller type of ships which Ocean Terminal could handle.

The Kai Tak Cruise Terminal has been criticised for its poor public transport connections. Photo: May Tse

Up until then, much of the emphasis in marketing Hong Kong as a tourism destination was on our reputation as a “shoppers’ paradise”. It was fine to keep that up as long as we could, but eventually competing destinations might catch up, and Dubai and Hainan have since done so. Even if we could maintain our edge, there was surely no harm in having an extra string to our bow.

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