Crowne Plaza: <i>plus ca change...</i>

"Relaxing in a hotel, digesting a newspaper article featuring Francis Zammit Dimech, yet again highlighting the quantity of five-star hotel projects on the archipelago.

"Just then, a young waitress, whose shift had ended 35 minutes earlier, caught my eye, smiled and bade me goodbye: something awry. Who, in the real professional world, works for charity in what purports to be a commercial entity? Paradoxically, the minister's reported celebration of the hospitality industry confines itself exclusively to artifacts. Scant, if any reference is made to what is first, second, foremost, and always, a service industry. Only a focused fellow human being can offer the personal touch with good grace and style.

"Nevertheless, our Minister of Tourism obliviously overlooks this vital component which adds meaningful emotional value to our guests' stay.

"So, what of our waitress? Her staggered, erratic shifts severely compromise, if not curtail, quality social time or the pursuit of timetabled courses or interests. Her working conditions are squalid, her salary and career prospects derisory. How soon before the 'industry' burns her out, losing her talent, expertise, experience and zeal?

"Whether they produce bronze, silver or gold, persons can only sustainably deliver in direct proportion to the quality of care and support they receive.

"Though the minister's optimism is welcome, as is his customary beam, it would help a whole heap, if he touched base and got real. He would do well to 'stand the post and serve in a forward area', as a 'hot bothered, liveried lobby jobber' in a hotel for a while before disseminating yet another catalogue of trite, myopic waffle."

Taken in 2003, that snapshot of The Mistra Village Complex, since then prematurely doomed to dusty demise, was but an ominous precursor of the shameful fate of The Crowne Plaza Hotel and its staff, shoddily dispensed with like disposable cog fodder in a vile "commercial" manoeuvre bereft of even a scintilla of morality.

Their plight is the inevitable consequence of price fixated practices given unfettered rein, irrespective of economic sustainability, quality, value or human and environmental cost.

Yet the minister, blithely presiding over this humanitarian outrage, still has the brazen gall to continue drivelling about hotel bedrooms.

It all begs some telling questions: Chronic waffling apart, what has actually changed, minister? Who's duping whom? Is it not merely a matter of redefining your crass attitude and abject ineptitude, as legendary as they are inveterate, as a clear cut case of rueful déjà vu?