DESERT FANTASIES - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 145

people. The UAE doesn't have that volume of water so they retrieve it from the ocean and
put it through desalination plants, one of the reasons why the Middle East has half of the
world's desalination plants. Environmentalists say this is a disaster in the making.
Stahl said that golf courses and all heavily irrigated landscaping have to be reimagined,
if not replanted with local plants that require far less water and provide shade as well as soil
treated to retain water. “The proper planting cuts water usage in half,” he said. “It makes
sense for a business because it cuts cost, too.”
He proposed a carefully supervised rating system to insure that water is managed effi-
ciently and some system of punishment if it is not.
The water problem goes beyond the difficulty of supplying enough fresh drinking wa-
ter. (The UAE is also one of the biggest consumers of bottled water.) The tourism de-
mands are overwhelming to the point of farcical. The new Iceland Water Park is 120 acres
of artificial pools, slides and 'rivers' tied together with the theme “Let's Freeze the Desert.”
Naturally it claims to have the largest man-made waterfall in the world, the 120-foot-tall
Penguin Falls, which requires 100,000 gallons of water every minute to create the fall.
Without government subsidies for water and energy, these projects wouldn't be profit-
able.
• • •
I almost skipped the last session which, after a confusing beginning, brought a coda to
the conference and the UAE's contribution to the tourism industry. The panels dealt with
a concept called “Emiratization.” When I first heard it, I thought the speaker was saying
“amortization,” and I wondered whether you could amortize tourism the way you amortize
your mortgage. “Emiratization” means convincing native Emiratis to join the workforce in
all fields and become masters of their economy.
In this instance “emiratization” meant simply convincing the native Emiratis that they
should work in the tourism field. Among the most pampered people in the world, many
citizens of the UAE need not work. The panel concentrated on coaxing the natives in-
to the workplace, setting up “ambassador” programs to find out what jobs most interested
prospective employees, then to teach and train these locals about tourism and their native
heritage.
“We receive complaints from tourists that there are no Emiratis in our hotels,” said Gh-
anim Al Marri, who joined Jebel Ali International Hotels in 1993, becoming the first nat-
ive to work in the hospitality sector. Very few have followed him.
“We need locals in hotels who know our own style of welcome and hospitality,” he said.
Education was one of the answers to this dilemma, and the audience that morning was
filled with local students studying tourism under visiting foreign instructors such as Bri-