LAST week the Scots had a chance to prove they can be a hospitable race and rose to the challenge. As thousands of American tourists and business travellers found themselves stranded at Edinburgh and Glasgow airports as a result of the terror attacked on the United States, scores of residents of Scotland’s two big cities spontaneously phoned their local tourist boards and the airlines to offer them accommodation.
In the event this warm gesture, greatly appreciated by the area tourist boards and VisitScotland, turned out to be unnecessary: there were enough hotel rooms to go around. But it showed — despite the endless jokes about “you’ll have had your tea” — that we are capable of being truly hospitable. And hopefully not just in times of crisis.
It’s in the same vein as the “Dunkirk spirit” that has been so prevalent on the streets of Manhattan ever since people got over the immediate shock of last Tuesday’s horrific attacks.
The more worrying thing for Scottish businesses — and particularly those involved in the tourist trade — is how American consumers will react to the atrocities in the longer-term.
There are inevitably going to be parallels with the way in which both American tourists and business travellers responded to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 and the subsequent Gulf War.
Very few dared board a aircraft for a few months, perhaps for fear that Iraqi terrorists would seek retribution for the events in the Persian Gulf and on the Basra Highway.
The knock-on effect on Scotland, where Americans account for about one-quarter of spending by overseas visitors, was a 9% drop in figures for the following year. After that, the Scottish tourism market took about four years to fully recover.
Some experts believe last week’s events will have an even more damaging effect.
Currently, US visitors are the mainstay of Scottish tourism, with the latest figures from VisitScotland showing they spend £240 million of the £945m spent by overseas visitors here.
That’s an awful lot of dollars to lose, particularly since hoteliers and other leisure operators have still to recover from the damage caused by foot-and-mouth.
Coincidentally, the rural affairs minister Ross Finnie only declared Scotland to be free of that dreadful epidemic on Tuesday — the day the Twin Towers and Pentagon were struck.
Showing uncanny prescience, Mike Cantlay, deputy chairman of VisitScotland, said at a tourism seminar earlier this year that “the only thing worse than foot-and- mouth for tourism is a war”.
He’s right. And now that we may be facing one, a group that owns three hotels in Edinburgh is already assuming that it will have no further American guests until the end of the year. They have been “wiped out” from its revised business plan.
Another company that operates three hotels on the West Coast of Scotland is expecting no further trade at all this month, having recently switched its entire marketing thrust to the USA and given up on Europe.
Many people are going to be too frightened to travel internationally for the foreseeable future, a situation that was not helped by the fact that armed police thwarted further hijacking attempts on two of the first flights from American airports since the disaster. So tourist businesses should now be thinking of ways of making up for lost business.
An obvious short-term measure is to step up marketing activities to domestic visitors from within the UK.
George W Bush can play a part here. If the US president can resist the temptation to go for a kneejerk demonstration of American military might that would risk provoking a prolonged Middle Eastern conflagration, recovery from last week’s events may come sooner.
Many people involved in the Scottish tourism sector are privately hoping, even praying, that “Dubya” will keep a cool head and ensure that any US retaliation is measured, considered and focused.
As US airlines take to the skies once more, they can obviously also help to nip passenger paranoia in the bud by ensuring they and the airports they fly from fully adhere to “normal” international security procedures.
The issue facing Scottish business and industry more generally is whether the mayhem and murder in Manhattan and Washington DC is going to increase the chances of a recession in the US — which, given the interconnectedness of the global economy, would have severe implications for Scottish and UK growth.
Most economists agree that the risks of a technical US recession (meaning two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth) later this year have been heightened, instead of the modest recovery that some were expecting.
Indeed it would seem bizarre if the terrible sequence of events last Tuesday did not dent US consumer confidence in some way or another.
While levels of fear and uncertainty remain high — and remember the US and Nato response has still to be seen — corporate investment and consumer spending plans are bound to be scaled back. But the big imponderable is whether US consumers will put up the shutters completely.
Much will depend on how Bush plays his hand and, for example, whether he takes steps to reassure people that it can be business as usual by for example bringing forward his promised tax cuts. But you have to remember that consumer confidence in the USA was starting to look a little bit shaky even before the attacks.
When oil prices surged after Iraq invaded Kuwait on 2 August 1990, consumers hunkered down and the ensuing US recession lasted until March 1991. It was followed by a slow, uneven recovery, that did not strengthen enough to cause unemployment to stop rising until the middle of 1992.
If American consumers do put up the shutters, then the terrorists will have succeeded. For they will have achieved what is their ultimate goal — tipping both the US and global economies into uncharted waters at the same time as breaking American hegemony.
Very few Scottish firms would benefit from that.
This article was written three days after the 9/11 terror attacks and published in the Sunday Herald on 16 September 2001,