Travel, Tourism, and Food Safety
February 2003
The recent scare that is still impacting the cruse industry, is another example of how important health is to the travel industry. Although no one has connected bad food to cruse lines and there has been no connection between acts of terrorism and these incidents, these recent events should remind us that health and food are essential components of any successful tourism industry. Food is especially unique as people often go on vacation to eat. How the traveler judges a locale may be as much determined by the food that he/she eats as by any other one single factor. Food can make people both happy and angry. Overpriced food is not only expensive, but serves to spoil the event. To help you think about the impact of food on your section of the tourism industry, please consider the following.
- From the perspective of tourism, the age of the rapid franchise is now in decline. Tourism is about new experiences, and too many fast food restaurants have not found a way to mix efficiency with the local cuisine. Travelers simply do not want to eat what they can have at home. To add to this problem, too many fast food restaurants are simply less and less efficient. As the fast food industry tried to expand its menu, it lost its most precious resource: time savings. To lessen this problem, work with your fast food outlets. Help them to theme their restaurants, to drop specific items from the menu and to add others. Remind them that national surveys are not only incorrect when it comes to the world of travel but most likely counter productive.
- Do a restaurant inventory. The public often seeks places that are out of the way or unique. Train personnel to steer people who desire such eating options to these types of places. Often, out of the way restaurants have special schedules and are hard to find. These moments are customer service moments. Taking the time to call for the visitor, giving directions or helping the person in some other special way, will become part of the dining experience.
- Talk about multi-lingual menus. In places where there are visitors from many places, create multi-language menus. If there are no translators around, speak with your local community college or high school foreign language teachers.
- Train waiters and waitresses to be culturally and medically sensitive. If a person asks for no pork, do not bring a salad with bacon bits and teach one’s staff Never to state: it is just a little bit. Waiters and waitresses should be familiar with the content of menus and if that is impossible, then train them to ask rather than create an answer. In a world with cultural, religious, health, and allergic restrictions, such a policy is essential.
- Become know for some special food. Your community or attraction may not be Paris, New Orleans or New York, but so what. To make a food-impact, all you have to do is to develop one local dish and then get it publicized. In a like manner, ambience can add a great deal to the dinning experience. In reality the type of ambience or décor is less important than the fact that it meets the public’s expectations. For example, several lower East Side New York City restaurants have created an image of brashness bordering on rudeness that seems to fit expectations and has become its own sort of tourist attraction. The public will do the rest.
- Work with local health boards. A tourism industry can be destroyed by the public’s perception that eating there is unsafe. Several Latin American nations suffer from the fact that the public believes that they do not offer clean drinking water, wholesome food products, or that there is a general lack of sanitation. Whenever you see a health violation, report it to both the owner and to the proper authorities. Remember it takes very little to destroy a tourism industry.
- Meet with restaurateurs regarding the safety of salad bars and buffets. The first act of food terrorism in modern history took place in the 1980s in the State of Oregon. Too many people in the tourism and travel industry have not begun to think through this potential problem.
- Work with local fairs and events. Most rural events and festivals serve food, yet rarely do they consider issues of risk management. In most cases, the food problems that take place at a festival can be avoided with some extra planning and a bit of caution. Ask yourselves if the event/festival manager has taken a course in food safety, how much attention has been paid to risk management issues, and what policies and procedures would go into effect in the event of a problem.
- Remember the last and first impression of a locale are almost always the most important. What is true of landscaping is also true of urbanscaping and restaurantscaping. The types of food that is offered to incoming and departing visitors helps to set the entire trip’s mind-set. These then are the establishments that ought to receive your top culinary priority.
