The Daily News Of The Virgin Islands

Beverage Trade Newsletter Takes Potshots at V. I.

St. Thomas was sharply criticized as a negative tourist attraction in the latest issue of Frank Kane's Weekly Letter to Beverage Industry Executives.

The article described local waiters and bartenders as unbelievably surly, arrogant and supercilious and noted that passengers on the cruise ship Nieuw Amsterdam were vastly displeased with island service.

Kane reported that a consensus of Nieuw Amsterdam tourists was that St. Thomas was the worst of the ports at which they had stopped.

Waiters ignored them, bartenders pretended not to hear them and service was unbearably bad even at the best hotels.

The article continued:

"The manager of one of the best hotels on the island, helplessly agreed with a patron who complained bitterly of the bar treatment and explained, 'We've got a labor shortage. I couldn't replace them but they'd have another job tomorrow'.

Our own experience (Kane's) was that we were visiting the island to try its highly touted banana daiquiri at the suggestion of the V.I. Rum Council.

The bartender at this leading hotel told us that he had no bananas and wasn't making any more banana daiquiris despite the fact that a bin with at least a dozen bananas was plainly visible at the end of the bar."

Kane's booklet described an incident at another "tourist attraction" in which a tourist was told he couldn't use the rest rooms because they were for guests only. Still another case cited was four tourists who were ignored at a bar for 15 minutes while a bartender busied himself at the other end of an empty bar.

"This is the island when, a couple of years ago, some of the cruise ships started to pass it up as a port of call, the Chamber of Commerce put on all kinds of pressure to have it reinstated. But now prosperity has raised its ugly head . . . . and the natives have reverted to their former arrogance and sheer lack of courtesy . . . . an attitude summed up quite obviously 'you came, we didn't send for you'."

Kane summed up his blast with the following comment:

"It's too bad that with a growing rum industry, with millions tied up in luxury hotels, with the most wonderful scenery in the world and a climate that can't be beaten, that the help can't be taught the meaning of the word hospitality. There's a big public relations job to be done in St. Thomas and the rum people should insist that it get started as soon as possible."

Kane also criticized the "taxi-cab racket" in Antigua and the recent hotel overbooking scandal in Puerto Rico but he called San Juan "a paradise compared to St. Thomas."