CHIANG RAI, 18 SEPTEMBER 2018: Nay Pyi Taw, the political capital of Myanmar, attracts hordes of business travelers who have little choice.
They had to fly to Nay Pyi Taw, 300 kilometers from Yangon, for business meetings with government officials. From Yangon alone, about 10 flights a day land at the city’s ornate but largely deserted airport.
Remove this requirement and few travelers would want to use Nay Pyi Taw Airport as a gateway to Myanmar.
This can be seen in the flight listing at the airport. There are 53 flights per week to Yangon, 7 flights to Bangkok and only 2 flights to Kunming, China. But that’s only a small part of the problem.
Solving the Nay Pyi Taw puzzle is much more difficult. Faced with a flood of vacant three- and four-star hotel rooms and two equally desolate convention centers, transforming the city into a vibrant tourist destination has become a perpetual quest for tourism.
As the saying goes, the success of a hotel depends on three simple factors – location, location or location – why waste precious time thinking of commercial solutions to what is essentially a political artifact? These hotels are just in the wrong destination.
The wishful thinking that got Nay Pyi Taw to where it is today, and if there is no political miracle to fill these vacant hotel rooms, it may well be; delusional.
But that hasn’t stopped people from trying, and last week, the political capital held a workshop to ponder a decade-old question: What is Nay Pyi Taw’s place in tourism?
The tourism industry is keen to find a solution for the vacant hotels in Nay Pyi Taw, but they may forget to consider the consumer point of view. Instead, tourism leaders concoct plans that are ultimately irrelevant. Travel consumers don’t buy it.
So it’s no surprise that workshop leaders see political capital as a major event destination. They call it “MICE” (Meetings, Incentives, Congress and Exhibition), a catchphrase that is now being spread as Nay Pyi Taw’s quick fix.
Nay Pyi Taw’s roughly 8,000 hotel rooms sit on disused four-lane boulevards, the result of developers’ wishful thinking. If they build a hotel in Nay Pyi Taw, the government will support their application for a commercially viable property elsewhere, or so they think.
If someone asks me to go the extra mile to hit sales targets and win bonus holiday prizes (Nay Pyi Taw holidays), I’ll ask my boss what the second prize destination is. This is the fate of political capital. How many people would choose to visit Canberra rather than stay in Sydney or Melbourne?
But these practicalities don’t stop the Burmese tourism industry from guessing they can conjure a rabbit out of a hat, hey Nay Pyi is a must visit for every corporate sales exec looking to win a seat at full cost, cool purpose Local paid incentive activities.
According to the Myanmar Times, the conversation turned to Chinese tourists and a Chinese airline offering to charter flights to transport 1 million Chinese tourists to Nay Pyi Taw.
Enter the total into a mobile phone calculator and see where the Chinese airline arithmetic takes us. Typically, charter airlines flying within Asia deploy the popular A320, which seats about 200 passengers with limited legroom. If the airline offered daily charter flights to Nay Pyi Taw, the Chinese carrier could carry up to 73,000 passengers over a period of more than a year. So who conjured up a million? They should definitely win a week off from Nay Pyi Taw to let their creative imagination run wild.
But when you’re talking about a trip to a political capital at a high-level seminar, a million sounds better. For the record, Nay Pyi Taw does have a few tourist attractions, one of which is the elephant enclosure, where three majestic “white elephants” live in the shade. That says it all.
