Michael Karam: Lebanon just needs to seek out the right kind of traveller

With the "mega-tourists" of the Gulf unlikely to return to Lebanon anytime soon, the country's tourism officials should tap into the European market to attract wealthy travellers looking for less predictable destinations.

I don’t really have what most people call a normal job. Apart from the writing, I get involved in “projects”. It’s all very hand to mouth, but there it is. I’m working with a UK restaurant group to arrange a trip to Lebanon for its club members. You would think that after the Tunisian guards in Souss just sat back and let a lun­atic with an AK-47 run riot and kil2l 38, mostly British, tourists back in June 2015, as well as the coverage of the ISIL phenomenon, enthusiasm for holidays in the Arab world would be pretty damp, but it turns out that the trip has been oversubscribed.

I assume this is because Beirut has an aura that should have been erased 42 years ago with the outbreak of the civil war, but even with its obvious problems – rubbish, traffic … the list is endless – its faded glamour has a curious and stubborn habit of making people fall in love with it.

Beirut has a bit of 1940’s Casablanca about it. After the civil war it was a haven for émigrés, bankers, spies (the British MI6 agent Kim Philby defected to Russia from a Beirut port) and chancers of every stripe. It is still a city where anything can be bought for the right money. I spend my time between the UK and Lebanon and while everything in Hove, where I live, works, I can’t seem to shake the need for an injection of energy that only Beirut can give me. I’m sure there are other cities with a similar aura, but Lebanon’s capital is my particular poison.

Only last week, I was driving around the fringes of downtown Beirut with a British publisher. He had been enthusing about the city since he arrived early that morning on the Middle East Airlines red-eye from London. Now we were stuck in traffic on a particularly bullet-pockmarked street (25 years after the war many scarred buildings still exist) and he was craning to see everything. I assumed he was scanning the area with disapproval but it turned out to be wild eyed, childlike awe. “Love the shabby chic,” he said before falling back satisfied into his seat.

But back to the 30 or so adventurous, and by all accounts affluent, British tourists chomping at the bit to sample “The Lebanon”. I had a hand in drafting the three-day itinerary, which takes in Beirut, the northern fishing village of Batroun and the Bekaa Valley – and it occurred to me that because of its size, Lebanon really is the prefect mini-break destination for Europeans. Even from London, it’s only a four-hour flight.

The government needs to get on board with this idea because the way things are looking, the mega-tourists from the Gulf who once poured millions of dollars into the nation’s tills aren’t returning any time soon and it is sad to see all the boutiques on Rues Foche and Allenby, their window displays immaculately cur­ated, with little or no customers. In fact the whole of downtown Beirut, rebuilt as a tourist destination, is a ghost town.

The ministry of tourism, which has a woefully small budget given the importance of tourism to the private sector, has made a decent fist making low-budget films with clever use of drones capturing what is left of Lebanon’s natural beauty, which can circulate on social media. But it needs to be more strategic and, as the Americans say, reach out to a certain European traveller, the empty nesters with disposable incomes who seek less predictable destinations, like my lot from London.

We need to rethink who we welcome. Europeans will not be happy just to shop and while away the day smoking shisha. They will have read up on the place before they arrive and they will want to look under every rock, visit every site and ask endless questions.

In that sense, selling the mini­break package is the easy bit. The profile of travellers Lebanon might attract will not be put off by security alerts or foreign office advisories, but they will also not tolerate rubbish on the streets, a lack of environmentally friendly policies and tourism professionals who don’t know their onions either. But these are all issues Lebanon should be working on anyway.

We just have to want it badly enough.

Michael Karam is a freelance writer who lives between Beirut and Brighton.

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