Swiss Review 6/2020

Swiss Review / November 2020 / No.6 27 has had zero impact fromour point of view,” says Giuseppe Rossi, general manager of Hotel Splendide Royal, a luxury five-star venue situated on the shores of Lake Lugano. Since the introduction of the ban, the proportion of Arab guests at the hotel has remained the same. Visitors fromthe Gulf States accounted for 32,000 over- night stays in Ticino last year, equivalent to 1.7 per cent of all guests. However, Ticino saw a 28 per cent decline in overnight stays by tourists from the Gulf States between 2015 and 2019. “It is hard to say what effect the ban on full- face coverings has actually had, because only a small per- centage of our Arab guestswear burkas or niqabs,” says the Ticino tourist board, Ticino Turismo. The drop innumbers is not attributed to the burka ban, but to the rift between Qatar and the Gulf Cooperation Council resulting in re- duced flight routes to Europe. Nevertheless, tourist destinationswith a relatively high proportion of Arab holidaymakers share a certain unease regarding any ban. This was clear to anyone who attended a panel discussion on the anti-burka initiative that took place in Interlaken in January 2017. According to a local newspaper report, the then deputy CEO of the Interlaken tourist board, Stefan Ryser, said, “Visitors from the Gulf States are very good guests. They stay for five nights on av- erage and bring in lots of revenue.” Travel agents in these countries would follow the debate surrounding any ban closely and draw their own conclusions, he added. On the other hand, a number of hoteliers in attendance noted that European guests felt uneasy when they saw fully veiled women in the breakfast room. Visitors fromthe Gulf States accounted for 92,000 overnight stays – or 8.6 per cent of all overnight stays – in the Interlaken area last year. These figures are also down, having stood at 120,000 and 13.1 per cent respectively in 2015. Tourism experts have avoided making any official statements regarding the anti-burka initiative. The Inter- laken TourismOrganisation (TOI) says that its position is secular and politically neutral. “Neither do we define our guests by race or religion. Interlakenwelcomes all visitors,” says TOI spokesman Christoph Leibundgut. Given the drastic consequences that the COVID-19 pandemic has had on tourism, the implications of a ban on full-face cov- erings would also appear to be of secondary importance at the moment. Meanwhile, Giorgio Ghiringhelli has every reason to be happy. Thanks to direct democracy, one man from Ticino has single-handedly managed to escalate a heated debate all the way up to federal level, irrespective of the outcome of the March vote. GERHARD LOB IS A FREELANCE JOURNALIST BASED IN TICINO A veiled tourist and a local folklore group in Geneva – the Egerkingen Commitee wants to ban cultural encounters like this one. Photo: Keystone (2015)